skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A Randomized Trial Comparing Antibiotics with Appendectomy for Appendicitis
Five ways to keep working from home safe for your employees and your company
Functional directives allow schema-first development, which can be a good idea. Your security rules and graph edges, etc, can live where the data lives.

problem is, all the reference implementations lack functional directives...
Good lord. Old XLS files. I'd love to have seen how this was concocted.
I've been bitten by this exact issue (albeit on non critical data), save a file as XLS it will silently drop rows beyond 65k - save it as XLSX and it's all good..
The terminology is occasionally used with a more technical meaning in algorithms, so perhaps that's how it's being used here.

"Optimistic" often means "assume X, perform or calculate something, change the result if X turns out to be false".

"Pessimistic" often means "assume not-X, perform or calculate something, maybe change the result if X turns out to be true".

This comes up in other domains.

For example in compilers (and reverse engineering decompilers ;-) there are optimistic and pessimistic analyses.

An optimistic analysis might initially assume a particular variable has a specific value at a particular location, or a branch is always taken. Then trace through the program paths, using that assumption (which limits those paths). If it loops back to the location with a different value in the variable or different value for the branch condition, broaden the assumption and update the trace.

A pessimistic analysis might initially assume the variable at a particular location could have any value because it hasn't yet traced everywhere to find out the possibilities, or initially assume both directions at the branch could happen and include them both in the trace. By the time it finishes tracing all paths and values, those assumptions may turn out pessimistic and it can start pruning away unused options.

These two strategies can yield different answers, and for some analyses the optimistic strategy gives more accurate results than the pessimistic strategy.

So which one is more "real"? :-)
If you find this topic interesting, there’s a book by Kerry Segrave called ‘Vending Machines: An American Social History’ that’s surprisingly readable for a book about the history of vending machines.
Like I said, that's the way I heard it, the way it was narrated to me.

The Guardian reported my version:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/05/how-excel-m...

CSV would to me make more sense than an outdated binary format like XLS, but either story is plausible.
On Slack it's only ever been an annoyance for me, because at least they visibly tell you when the message eventually fails to send. But on services like Twitter I feel gaslit when I've liked a tweet and then I scroll by it again later, un-liked. It undercuts my faith in the integrity of the entire interface. Any part of it could be lying to me in a way I may never find out about.

Overall I strongly dislike this UX pattern. Users should have immediate feedback about actions that haven't completed, but that feedback should only tell them the truth: that the operation has begun.
Thanks so much! I worked really hard on it and I was lucky to have some codebase that I could reuse from another project.
Specific Orwell reference:

"He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen
There is a great PBS Frontline documentary called ‘Firestone and the Warlord’ about the Liberian Civil War in the 80’s and 90’s and the role that the Firestone Tire company had in legitimizing Charles Taylor (who was convicted of war crimes and is now in jail). I had no idea about Liberia let alone that they had a civil war, which was mainly about the dominance in Liberian society of black Americans.
Excel may not be a database solution, but it is the most commonly used database solution.
Another interesting pro of S7 is that it compiles to webassembly! Chistos Vagias has made a neat demo of that to allow you to try it in the browser. https://actondev.github.io/s7-playground/
Unless these devices have enough performance to do on-device speech recognition, they could have to stream audio on an ongoing basis.

I think the data stream from uploading compressed audio for an extended period would be difficult to hide.
The last time I opened a pdf file in Chrome/Firefox in Github PDF renderer, the computer ran out of RAM. The pdf file I opened definitely didn't require so much RAM at all.

Alternative solution: download and open it locally
The common case for stories like this is the answer is "nobody."

Time point 1: "We need a way to map the long-form epidemiology state. It's 2D data... Let's use Excel." "Will we hit limits?" "Pfft, no. Not unless we end up needing to track tens of thousands of patients, and that's not practical; we don't have enough people to do that tracking in the whole NHS."

Time point 2: "This pandemic is an URGENT problem. We need to hire more people than ever before to do tracing. And be sure to keep the epidemeology state mapper updated so it can drive the summary dashboards!"
iClearly this is why I love vim, I have a ritual of needing to press i, I, a, A or o, O before typing what I need to type
Okay, not stolen, but attacked with malware.
Don't forget healthcare! Excel and CSV for tons of data exchange.
Everyone has opinions. If that bothers you, try to ignore them.
Interesting. They keep trying to push Chime on us, so I'm surprised to hear they're using Slack internally.
Friends don't let friends use Excel.

Unfortunately Excel is the great swiss army knife of software and it's hard to avoid.
I just installed python 3.8 on my Ubuntu 14.04... Had to also upgrade openssl and lzma for it to be useful though
..this right here.
No error checking, inadequate testing, no reconciliation process.

Excel is used extensively in many industries.
Any file could be cut off in processing by any number of reasons, one off errors for e.g.

So the solution is to "fix" the process by using the existing broken process and smaller files....
It would be fair to compare that with statistics on how many cops are killed by civilians.

Also consider the wildly different statistics on gun possession in the populations.
If the conversion was failing silently, it's a Microsoft software problem, but I bet you money the conversion was failing in a way that fell into a `catch(Exception e) { }` somewhere in their conversion script. Or even a `catch(Exception e) { log e; }`, and the log is stored to local storage on a machine that no human being ever logs into.
Perhaps some old integration code from 10+ years ago that was written to spit out XLS rather than XLSX

e.g. some old versions of Crystal Reports can only do XLS. There must be loads old systems around that can only do XLS
Saw it too now, thanks for the sources!
I knew there was another #[repr(…)] value, just couldn’t remember its name and didn’t look it up. Thanks for pointing it out. Yep, #[repr(transparent)] is a correct way of fixing the undefined behaviour—and if it won’t compile, then #[repr(C)] will do.
Beautiful versions of brokenness, the tale of a workflow
I do think that things are trending in the right direction with regards to physician arrogance.

Here's a paper from the International Journal of Surgery that talks about this issue:

"Today however there is a new alliance between the doctor and patient, based on co-operation rather than confrontation, in which the doctor must “understand the patient as a unique human being”. Thus patient-centered care has replaced a one-sided, doctor-dominated relationship in which the exercise of power distorts the decision-making process for both parties."

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsu.2006.01.005

(Although if it was written by surgeons, might take it with a grain of salt.)

Definitely an arrogant physician is something that will hopefully fade into obscurity as patients become more educated, and medicine becomes more corporate 'customer-centered' and less solo practice.

With regards to patient intuition, that's actually a field of active research. When do you trust patient intuition, and when do you not?

"Intuition, like analytical reasoning, is fallible. However, we suggest conditions under which clinicians and patients should take patient intuition seriously. We invite empirical investigation of these conditions, which relate to the credibility (or accuracy) of the intuition and its meaning and significance to the patient. More generally, research is needed on non-conscious and automatic processes of decision-making and on how patient intuition can complement rather than oppose reasoned thinking in jointly shaping patient and clinician judgments, decision-making and action. Such research may help to integrate the processes of intuition and reasoning used by patients and clinicians in decision-making, with a goal of improving the patient-clinician relationship and health outcomes."

Buetow SA, Mintoft B. When should patient intuition be taken seriously?. J Gen Intern Med. 2011;26(4):433-436. doi:10.1007/s11606-010-1576-6
AI Show: Tune in Oct 6 at 10AM PT and Meet Jeremy Howard, Cofounder of Fast.ai
Moving from XLS to XLSX will break your macros and would require all machines to be running Office 2007 or later.
I think I see what you're saying - but the replies didn't accuse you of thinking it referenced black people. They disagreed that it is an example of something which is likely enough to be misinterpreted that it should have had a different name.
Uh, how do you “bootstrap” a team of 9 at $1m ARR? I thought bootstrapping means your revenues cover your costs.
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken

Also, the same skills required to come up with good ideas are probably the same skills required to make those ideas work. If you're experienced enough to know there's a need in some market, you'll only succeed if you have experience enough to develop and sell a solution. So, if someone successfully takes the market from under you they were probably already ahead of you even when you were first.

But the above quote is also why I'm skeptical of validating ideas in the landing page stage. The walkman was just as good as the iPod until I spent 5 minutes using the iPod, but no landing page would've convinced me.
Remote Work and Mental Health
Graph of HN Who's hiring 2019 compared to 2020
Yeah this persons actions are VERY concerning. They need to change their behaviour immediately.

To Ogre_... you cannot self diagnose by saying "I know when I'm feeling tired so I nap." Go To A Doctor NOW.
Hello GraphQL; Meet Cassandra
how does one manage new user creation dynamically? is the expectation here that there is a shared user that is preconfigured on the target host?
This is already being researched albeit in a much more subtle manner. Essentially add very mildly reflective gases to the mid/upper atmosphere to reduce solar radiation and combat climate change.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/harvard-group...
And why the DARPA-funded prediction markets were scrapped:

https://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/29/terror.market/
I tested my own system using Bruce's "measure_interval.cpp" program (on Windows 1909):

- Slack (sometimes) sets the global timer to 1ms when it is in the foreground, but restores it in background

- Spotify sets the global timer to 1ms, no matter what. Even if it isn't playing.

- Skype sets 1ms, if started at Startup (which it defaults to), even though I am logged out and it just has a tray icon. But when I manually start it, it doesn't (always) set it to 1ms.

- VSCode will set it to 1ms when you are interacting with it, but will eventually revert to 15.6ms if left alone (even if it is still in foreground).

- Firefox doesn't appear to set it (on its own; I presume that if I opened a tab that was using a low setTimeout or requestAnimFrame it might).

Spotify is interesting. A lot of people probably have that app, and since it sets 1ms unconditionally, it would have been setting fast-timer mode prior to the 2004 update, which could inadvertently "speed up" whatever games people were running.

That includes my own game, which uses a foreground sleep of as low as 1ms to try to hit its time target, and I don't call timeBeginPeriod. I guess I'll find out when I get the 2004 update.
Compatibility. It's reasonable to predict that some of the participating entities are running software that is at least a decade old.
Germany have similar things though I do not know of a general nature corridor project. There are rather project specific corridors i.e for wildcat (https://www.bund.net/fileadmin/user_upload_bund/bilder/wildk...) or the mentioned german green belt. These are smaller than the thing you link in Poland, however at least the green belt program is an initiative for almost 100% natural reserve (i.e no agriculture or forestry at all) in that area which I believe most other corridors are not. Also, there are lots of local projects to protect old tree alleys along smaller streets etc. that serve a similar purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Green_Belt
> Still, it boggles my mind. Why would you voluntarily do it? My parents only invited trusted friends to ensure nothing 'questionable' made it to the authorities ( former soviet republic ). People today brazenly broadcast it.

> I honestly do not get it.

Perhaps the important differences between us and the USSR are having a democratic legislative process and a fair judicial system, and the relevant extent of our surveillance apparatus is a secondary concern.

(Obviously, there are problems with our legislative and judicial systems - the point is that they are better than the former soviet republics'.)
A simple implementation that works on IE8 https://twitter.com/e1g/status/1313178559234609153
What is “comment selling”?
I really enjoy the ritual of cooking up my heroin in a spoon, watching it bubble and then seeing the tasty liquid sucked up into the hypodermic; then searching for a vein that hasn't already collapsed and inserting the needle. Drawing back the plunger and seeing blood -- ensuring that I've hit the vein properly, then squeezing the plunger until I've completed my hit...

Ahhh!
You probably work for a non-huge software product company or on an in-house team? In Europe the VAST majority of 'industry' is bespoke B2B projects/engagement shops. I can assure you all the 'terrible' things described above are very much standard across that segment.
Will definitely consider this. One issue maybe that I do get invited to a handful of events.

How exactly does this work. No longer having a public page , but people being able to contact me would be great .
It's not much good for comparrison with March when tests were only done in hospital, and I see a lot of people doing that

Most people who had covid by August (which was at least 6%, or 4 million, in the UK according to antibody tests) caught it between start of February and end of April. That's at least 3.5 million over 90 days, or 40k a day on average. Peak was likely double, maybe even treble that, given lockdown on 23rd of March dramatically cut infections.

We're likely testing somewhere in the region of 50% of actual cases. There's the non-symptomatic cases where about equal to the number of symptomatic cases, so double the absolute number -- some with symptoms will refuse to be tested because they don't want to miss work, some without will be caught by contact tracing, those two groups probably cancel each other out.

As such I'd expect 50k/day to be the "March equivelent" - with doubling every 10 days that means another 2 or 3 weeks.

It's not just about absolute cases though. Cases have been doubling roughly every 10 days, as have deaths. Deaths lag cases by 2-3 weeks, so I'd expect deaths in 20 days to be continuing to double even if we all stayed in an isolated booth from now.

Ultimately the concern is we're heading into flu season when hospitals are stretched, and cases, hospital admissions, and deaths are all increasing.

Hopefully flu season will be milder due to social distancing and due to more vulnerable people having been killed off, but either way we need to get a grip soon. Or just abandon any pretense of trying to stop its spread.
Aren't most modern CPUs tickless[1]? They effectively work the way you describe, the scheduler will sleep as long as possible instead of just "ticking" a NOP if nothing is scheduled.

The problem is that what you describe is very hard to guarantee in a non-realtime OS. Modern CPUs are pretty damn fast, that's true, but they can't task switch on a dime. The delay between an IRQ being triggered and task being scheduled can vary pretty wildly, especially if the CPU is already under a heavy load.

You can still try your luck with nanosleep() and see how that treats you. It might work. It probably won't always work.

In general if you need to react so fast on some event you probably want to avoid polling at all costs. That's why most OSs are fine relaxing timer constraints for better overall performance. If you can't react on an external interrupt and you really need to be reactive busy-polling is still probably your best bet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickless_kernel
ah, my sound was off. That is unnecessarily intrusive.
Inertia, most likely. They were using XLS 10 years ago and never saw a reason to change.
Yeah. lets hope there is some support we cannot see behind it.
My mind is blown how can you do any real change in the world without good data? We need exact classification of the data of dead people. If they had COVID, was it the main source of death, real cause of death, was it diagnosed(tested) or not...ect.
Until then, this stuff about COVID is total bullshit and you are being deceived and you are being to scared. SNAP OUT OF IT!
Dish soap is natural?
IIRC bootstrapping just means that you don't take VC funding, instead rely on yourself, family and friends. You certainly aren't always breaking even.
I've been writing CSS for about 10 years at nearly every professional job I've had. I don't get 'stuck' often and generally feel competent, but I am far from an expert or a master. I think CSS is difficult to understand because there are so many ways to accomplish a task, and so many of those ways lead to (sometimes) unforeseeable consequences, and nearly all of the APIs (possibly with the exception of css grid) don't feel very coherent... in my experience. I think it is difficult to learn because there's no real apparent holistic design to really grok.

I tried mdgriffith's elm-ui on a personal project and it was a breath of fresh air. It felt like an utterly excellent abstraction and I hope someone ports it to Typescript/React/JSX some day.
Yes, and we have to guard against knowledge regressions (dark ages) too. It is critical that we preserve our human tradition of passing inter-generational knowledge to the next generation. As an example, I see several older nerds complain that the new generation keeps re-inventing the same-old same-old tech, and I do see a small grain of truth there, but by and large I think we have successfully managed to transfer our knowledge and experience to the new generation so that they can push the boundaries even further.

I remember reading (think it was Neil Tyson) that at some point in the future, if the universe continues at its current rate of expansion, we (earth) might arrive at a future state where we cannot detect the cosmic b/g radiation and other markers which confirm certain physical characteristics of the universe. I wonder if the future humans will accept that the humans who came before them really observed this phenomenon and that they can rely on that data :)
there's no capital risk for the servicing company.
A proper alert on send failure sounds like a good idea.
Lest we forget the second wave in the US due to mass nationwide protests? Masking up is great, and there are too many busybodies in convenience stores getting upset because an employee asked them to wear a mask, but the problem is obviously deeper than a couple of anti-maskers
Yes, this is precisely what I was trying to get at.

The process is inefficient in that it takes a long time for it to get to a workable solution, but the solutions are usually incredibly efficient.
Compare to the flu... So many deaths of people with the flu are NOT flu deaths...
My guess: somewhere down the line someone who doesn't often use Excel typed ".xls" at the end of a string variable or selected it from a dropdown list and made a mental note to come back to it if it caused any issues in testing.
I fell asleep once and only hit tall grass... No damages luckily. I hope that they would stop mowing the side of highways (it is good for slowing you down)
So the limit for Excell is 65,000 rows for the old format, and one million-plus rows for the new format (from the article).

Then I wonder, is there any tool that mimic Excell but with Sqlite as the backend? The limit of rows in Sqlite is 2 raised to the power of 64 (18446744073709551616 or about 1.8e+19).

https://sqlite.org/limits.html
while the concept looks simple enough, i think it would covey the idea better to have actual screenshots from the various platforms.

also, if you want to get more people using i would suggest creating a wordpress plugin since that is the platform that most digital agencies (your target market) use for SEO.
Trignometric calculus comprised at least half my high school calc assignments ~20 years ago. Surely that can be scaled back in favour of more lessons on statistics and probability.
That's exactly what I was thinking about
Everybody on HN should read the tales of General Butt Naked

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked
It's almost as if you're describing LinkedIn...

(Where a message sent doesn't match what was typed sometimes.)
Please tell me that is not true. That is just...nuts! What is the rationale behind that beyond corruption?
Have you seen the kind of mess Excel can make with a CSV file? The names of several genes were recently changed so that Excel would stop mangling them.
You can always "bisect" through space (execution flow) OR time (commits) to find a bug.

I usually prefer through space, because
1. it actively helps narrow the buggy line in the code you're working on, instead of reflecting over different snapshots of code
2. sometimes you have nothing to bisect on, if it's code you're actively writing.

The author seems to have started bisecting through space using the debugger. Unfortunately they had the wrong understanding of the execution flow and quickly stopped after one step at the start of the route. Had they realized the route wasn't triggered they could have checked what happened in the authentication code.
Banking is, from a software perspective, a graph of connected, double-entry ledgers. On the back end, state changes propagate electronically over old and hoary roads (FTP, as another poster mentioned). The businesses that operate these strange constructs are old and powerful, and jealous of their position of authority. And the modern information age has vastly increased their power, as never before has so much information been available for so many transactions! Money is action is state, so the banks know, modulo cash spending, what literally everyone in the world is doing. If regulation and old tech wasn't there to protect their entrenched interests, the banks would have to invent it.
>Most convenience stores in the USA won't accept $100 bills AFAIK.

At some point, with some marginal exceptions (such as dollar coins that have never been that widely used and a $2 bill ditto), the US at some point apparently decided that it was going to keep the same coins and bills in general circulation forever. So we still have essentially valueless pennies and $100 bills, while in circulation, aren't taken by a lot of places in the US. They're even a bit hard to get. I had to go to a couple of bank branches last time I needed to restock my "emergency" travel cash supply.