skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> People refuse to stop using Excel because it empowers them and they simply don't want to be disempowered.

That is not always true in my experience. Many people use Excel because it's one of the two programming tools allowed by the IT department, the other being a web browser. Even if you manage to install Python or something (good luck getting the package management working from behind your corporate proxy), your collegue will not have it, so it's useless. And distributing executables is usually not tolerated either. So you use excel, and share Excel files.

I'll add that another big problem I have with Excel is usually the lack of database support. Moving data around by copy/pasting it in Excel with macros is a pain, and IT didn't allow Microsoft Access either so I can't comment on that. But I think it would have made my life easier.
But but...I though Machine Learning would help us... ;-)
https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...
I would like to point out that there is a huge difference between codified punishment vs how it is in practice.

For example I am pretty sure if you create a bill that says prison inmates are required to give a fellatio to other inmates it will not muster a single vote in Congress. Yet, it is reality of prisons. Now, is penitentiary supposed to punish people like this ? No. Do most Americans find pleasure in the fact that inmates in prison are treated like this ? I think Yes.

The point is once you are in prison for whatever reason, your life is essentially done even if the punishment was for few years. You wont get a job, no one will rent a place to you, you wont get a loan and so on. Unless you have a pretty big community safety net you wont survive.

Jails any ways are not supposed to punish people.
Emacs Typing Tutor
Criminal charges are filed in relatively few civil forfeiture cases. If civil forfeitures without criminal charges resulted in substantially more losses than burglaries, would you consider the prior poster's point provisionally made?

(I haven't attempted to see if that breakdown can be derived, I suspect it's true, but if you won't find it convincing it isn't worth trying to figure it out. :) )
What percentage of those countries are larger than California?
Thank you!! That was the most fun I've ever had on a tech talk. Any Pavlo is a one man army when it comes to fun questions and there were more like him in the audience. The whole series of quarantine talks was great.
Right, vs REAL inflation, which is measured by whatever I think happens to be too expensive right now.
The top earning 50% of Americans with a stable w2 job (union + white collar jobs) get very "good" insurance where their job pays most of, while they pay a modest copay.

The bottom earning 25% of Americans have 0 assets and 0 money, so health care is effectively free. Go to a hospital, they must treat you, you can't pay the bill, so it gets written off.

The 26-49th percentile of people who have some money but no insurance are the people screwed by the current system.

So the reason why American's tolerate it.. is it works decently for 75% of the population. And it is hard for 25% of the population to really change anything. And of those, many are young and healthy so they don't really care. So maybe we are talking about 12.5% of the population being actively screwed by the system at any given time...
Or even buy a copy of the book! We can do anything if we throw out all our requirements!

Can you explain how I'd make calls from a frontend to a PDF? I'd like to include various search terms, and then get back well-structured data.

Is this something PDF's recently started supporting?
I've only ever once been denied a request for annual leave, and I don't recall anyone I've told the story of that to ever having had a similar experience.

One place I worked had spelled out explicitly in the employee handbook that "if you want to take more than three weeks off consecutively, please give us at least two weeks' notice". They also discouraged people from scheduling holidays to accommodate deadlines on the basis that the deadline was probably going to shift, so it wouldn't help.
This is really cool stuff. Would be really nice to do the same for movies :)
This implanted microchip may one day control your sleep
tl;dr - dropped out to work in red hot job market.
I'd say first of all you could give your employees a few hours off to join the Global Climate Strike on 24.09.21. Also go there yourself along with your family. Repeat with all upcoming strikes.

What we need is immediate action from our policy makers!

About publications I can recommend Bill Gate's book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaste" he talks a lot about what innovation we need. I really liked the audio book.

I can also recommend the "TED Climate" podcast for more inspiration.

About Software: I'd say the world needs Software to support more efficient 100% electrification. Like an energy efficiency based shopping portal. Where e.g. not only showing the 5 air conditioners for the house size, but also rank them by follow up energy cost and device life time. Same for clothing, e g. rank by most efficient production chain and materials. For 3 T Shirts, I would buy the one with least impact. And so on. Please become so sucessfull with it, that producers live in fear of a bad ranking on your shopping plattform for creating an inefficient device or having a fossil fuel powered (coal powered machines, container shipping etc.) supply chain.

I believe such a platform would be a magnet for Friday for the Future grown ups in 5-10 years. And also Parents for the Future like me would buy there I promise. Investors would buy the concept too I think, for me it sounds promising. Especially in the US where customers don't have a reliable, official efficiency label.
At https://www.xltrail.com, we wrote an open-source Git extension that allows you to diff the VBA part of your Excel workbooks. The extension also integrates with SourceTree, Atlassian's free Git client. You can see some screenshots on my blog post: https://dev.to/fzumstein/how-to-diff-excel-vba-code-in-sourc...
I addressed that problem with Seveneves by skimming about 1/3rd of it.
@tracyhenry: how does the system work exactly? I cannot find any documentation on your website.
it also helps to look like you can afford a lawyer
There’s no good reason for those prerequisites to be shoehorned into a random bachelor’s degree. Medical schools can add another year or eighteen months and teach their students those subjects themselves.

This way is more revenue for BigEd though.
I got my parties of choice on all tools I have used. The fact that I always got the same results made me bored of these tools. Maybe tell people to actually read the party programs before doing the Wahl-O-Mat?

Also, don't forget to actually activate all parties. Selecting 5 right wing parties and then being surprised that you don't vote for them is stupid.
>"It's a nice thought experiment, but in my mind I think the world would be a better place without excel."

I stopped using excel after this whole subscription madness started and switched to native Softmaker Office. I keep countless small spreadsheets for various money related tasks and absolutely not prepared to spend any time / effort on doing it "the right way". My brain cells are much better off working on software design (the stuff that actually makes me money).
The issue is that those kinds of mixed use neighborhoods are literally illegal in most American Suburbs. Strong Towns goes over this, but our zoning laws are basically designed to create and exacerbate this problem long run
KYC procedures defeat the purpose of BTC. If it is tightly controlled, regulated and guarded by the same regulator which manages USD, then why use bitcoin?

On the other hand, those KYC procedures can be enforced in some jurisdictions, but not in all of them. What power does IRS have in Iran or Russia? How difficult is it to buy an identity in places like Egypt or Nigeria? How expensive is it to get authorities close their eyes on anything in places like Libya or Somali?
Inflation is not just about measuring prices. It is a really complicated number synthesized from both price signals(arguably the most objective data), surveys and ... educated opinions. For instance, economists just kinda have to put a number on what new technologies are worth. Modern car maybe costs more dollars, but you're also getting a better product type issues.

Inflation is based both on measurements and on judgement calls by economists responsible for calculating it. It's more objective than LIBOR or some crap, but (way way) less objective than the price of something on the stock market, or some other pure price signal.

'Asset' inflation isn't even part of CPI(like stock, cost of owning a house, tho rental is), is it? It's not even a claim to say that the dollar is devaluing against assets, it's just like tautologically what it means that asset prices are booming.
Hospitals in the US are required by law to provide stabilizing care to anyone that comes into the ER regardless of ability to pay. Prices are inflated for everyone else to subsidize this. It's like universal healthcare, but more expensive, less transparent and with worse outcomes!
Many people who rent do so because renting is better for them than buying.
When I was a kid we had an above ground pool that was about 3 feet/~1 m deep. One day in the shed I found a 6 foot/2m length of hose that looked to be about the same diameter as the tube on the my little snorkel. Ah ha! I can attach this to my snorkel, tie the other end to a pool float and breath under water like a diver!

My idea did not work out as planned. At the surface I was able to breath through the hose but once I tried to "dive" down I found that drawing a breath was difficult. At the full depth I could not draw a breath. I told my father later on (who was an engineer) and he explained the physics of water pressure.
So I don't know whether you've noticed, but there's this thing that's been going around that makes some people want to keep their distance from other people, even if they might otherwise want to converse with them?

More seriously: my father, who is about to turn 94, lives 500+ miles away from me, and I haven't seen him face-to-face for a long time. It would be nice to be able to watch a baseball game "together", for instance. I hope I can talk him through setting up FaceTime...
> Google started Android with a very similar model to iOS but quickly recognized it was turning into a disaster given the slow uptake of new Android versions. Turning what were system level components (e.g. play services) into "apps" was a necessity.

Apple hasn't had that same "pain" yet, iOS update rates are pretty high. If major OS update rates drop, then they'd be better motivated to cleanly separate their app updates from their OS updates. It just hasn't happened yet.

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/04/ios-14-installation-rat...
Why do they use "average" home price (without specifying whether it's mean, median, or modal), with "median" income? It makes these graphs very difficult to interpret.
What's wrong with readability optimizations, be they micro- or macro-?
I am of a different tact.

I love motorcycling. It is a passion. I had my motorcycle classification before I got my car license.

But, I don't recommend it to anyone. I will not be party to suggesting, encouraging, cajoling or any other "ing" to get someone on a bike.

It's too dangerous to allow someone else to convince you.

Anyone in the community for any duration has their share of personal experiences, being close to someone lost or badly hurt, or simply being in a small community where loss and injury happens. I've lost friends. Had my share of (thankfully) mostly minor injuries. I've gone down on a freeway in rush hour traffic. It happens, it's real.

The two highest cohorts of folks getting injured or worse on a motorcycle are folks riding under the influence, and folks new (or even returning) to riding. The first cohort you can do something about, don't drink. The second, you can take measures (training, reading, practice), but, in the end, you have to just survive through it. You have to find yourself in situations and work your way through them.

I like traveling on a motorcycle. I love long distance touring rides. One of the best aspects of riding is going on a long trip with a friend. You may both take the same path, but, in the end, you have separate journeys and get to share them at each stop. In a car, you have a driver, and everyone else essentially asleep. As a driver you're likely barely conscious. Fingertip on the steering wheel, cruise control holding steady, songs serenading you on the stereo. On a bike, that's just not the case.

On a bike, you get to smell the air. High on my list is riding behind a lemon truck. You get to feel the environment. It's hot. It's cold. It's wet. Ride through the desert and feel the temperature change as you drop down in to a wash, even if just for a few hundred feet before you rise back up in the heat.

I love it.

But I don't recommend it.
> The real problem isn't supply at all, it's the distribution of supply and the choices of people to live there.

I’ve said this plenty of times; America has plenty of homes, it just doesn’t have enough homes where people actually want to live.

You can get a home in my parents home town (which they left) for $60-100k right now. The issue is that there are no jobs and even fewer services. It was probably a great place to live 80 years ago when small towns were the norm, but now it’s shrinking, aging, and a long distance from any of the amenities that most Americans now demand.
Almost every country on earth outside of aberrations with atypical revenue sources are much poorer than the US. Government healthcare is not an unambiguous win; at best, it moves you around on the Pareto frontier. Americans can identify this at some level and are skeptical of adopting political changes that would make us more like other (poorer) countries.
I think the architecture of something like K8s pretty well sums up all (or most) of the components needed for a distributed system. What's really needed today is differentiation on the actual end result of that design. We need simpler technology that works better, and that's hard; it's not enough to have a fancy idea and throw together some lines of code. That's been done, and it kinda sucks. What's needed now is to focus on making it easier and simpler to do specific things.

For example: most people just want to receive infinite HTTP requests and route them to custom business logic, automatically scaling as needed. So why can't I just push a button and make that happen? AWS ECS has a command-line client now that attempts to do that, but it's clunky and unreliable. And K8s doesn't have anything like that; it's all hand-crafted YAML files and mountains of custom cluster configuration. I just want to run some code at scale. And we've implemented that (scaling web requests/business logic) a million times by now. But it's never really gotten significantly easier.

Docker is a good example of the amount of work you need to pour into a technical solution to make it a game-changing user solution. Docker is like 50 different technical solutions rolled up into one user-friendly command-line tool and a backend daemon. You could do most of what Docker does in LXC, but it was painful. Docker made it easy. That's what we need for running services at scale in general. Docker Swarm was created basically to scratch that itch, but it still hasn't really taken off. I'm hopeful it does one day.
If americans are overpaying for health insurance, where does that money go?

I heard nurses and doctors aren't paid enough. So does this money go to pay for backoffice hospital services? What happens if we reduce the cost of healthcare? will people lost their jobs? Do the "owners" of hospital or pharma equity get smaller dividends?
> Literally every other developed country on Earth has universal healthcare

And pretty much every one of those countries has it's health care R&D subsidized by the US(via drug costs borne by the US market) and in most cases also has its security subsidized by the US.

Basically, innovation in medical technology is underwritten by the US
Typing speed is not my bottleneck for generating code, it's renaming variables and rewriting it 5 times until it's no longer a mess.

A Vulcan mind meld would be nice but lacks precision.
The healthcare industry employs a lot of people due to all of the redundancies, especially on the billing/insurance side. A few of these people make a lot of money. None of these people want to lose their job, possibly get a paycut, or switch careers, even if it helps everyone else in the country.
Yup and until we start taking to the streets about it. It will never change. Voting is not enough.
> Go to a hospital, they must treat you

For emergency care, sure, but they don’t have to offer you expensive treatments for whatever health conditions you might have. It’s wishful thinking to think that poor Americans are getting adequate health care.
This is happening outside of the USA, in countries with more progressive taxation too. Canada, UK, Israel - all with much worse house price to income ratio compared to the USA.

These homes are not owned by billionaires either. It’s an asset class that’s very broadly distributed by its definition; most people own their homes.

I think it’s mostly driven by macroeconomics. Near zero interest, population growth (organic or through immigration) and historical real estate appreciation all fuel this trend.
My eye was drawn to the graphs. Especially the house price / income graphs. There seems to be a trend in the US graph: if you zoom in far enough, you can see a consistent drop in Januari (every year). The UK graph does not show this trend..

Does someone know the origin of this trend? And why the two countries don't show the same trend?
Similarly, retirement options need to stop being tied to employers as well.

I've written my representatives about this, but I also want to see the 401k separate from the employer. Reduce fees, allow anyone to have a 401k, and like an IRA, contribute however they wish, while also allowing employers to contribute to an employer bucket to keep matches for employers to provide those.

I switch jobs, my 401k can travel with me. Employers no longer need to supply one if they don't want to, they just have to support sending money to it via payroll deduction. There will be no more people who work but can't contribute to a 401k and lose that valuable option in addition to an IRA.
NOTE: Not the author.

I can't speak for Facebook, but I definitely feel like Apple made me stagnate intellectually. It didn't help that every time I wanted to work on something open source, I would get a nastygram from their legal team telling me that doing so would be grounds for termination.

That said, at least for me, college required a type of stick-with-it-ness that I don't really feel I obtained until having to sludge through horrible office jobs for years. Having to work for megacorps that I hated forced me to finish work that I didn't want to do, and trudge through meetings I didn't have any desire to go to. After the hundredth "glorified data entry" assignment and thousandth "sprint planning that I'm only relevant for two minutes of", pushing my way through college felt somewhat easy in comparison.

My path would be virtually impossible to recommend to people, but I honestly wouldn't change the order of how I did things given the option.
I've heard this simple explanation many times and it never makes sense. Review the EOB (Explanation of Benefits) after going to a hospital and getting examined by a resident, the bill is ~250$ for the 5min visit. Assume there is some work behind the scenes (writing scripts, reviewing charts) and one might think ~10min. That is effectively a million+ revenue center for the hospital for a resident making sub six figures, even considering 50% or more in charge-offs.

Why would the hospital restrict residency spots because of funding? Residents are wildly profitable, so that wouldnt make sense.

The explanation I'm told makes sense is this: US medical boards are unwilling to train more doctors because that would increase supply and reduce overall MD earnings. So they have a small number of openings each year, and blame the "shortage" on Congress.
Elon Musk mocks Biden after SpaceX completes first all-civilian mission
Its actually a pretty popular idea in the US. Why its not done is mostly a matter of one of the parties being obstructionist to any progress that's not a political win for them.

> Among the public overall, 63% of U.S. adults say the government has the responsibility to provide health care coverage for all, up slightly from 59% last year. Roughly a third (37%) say this is not the responsibility of the federal government...

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/29/increasing-...
Yes exactly! The wifi bridge mode of the Cradlepoint is super interesting. One major drawback I've found in practice is that if the campground/public wifi network has a splash page, I basically can't get it to work. It takes some serious troubleshooting to get setup even when everything should be straightforward and obvious sometimes too. Cannot beat the few instances where I got massive bandwidth off of a terrible wifi connection though. No wonder the campground wifis always seem to be terrible with direct connect normal devices :)

I've been rather lazy the last 6 months and don't even bother with wifi bridging and just rely on Verizon as primary and ATT as backup.

Good call on managing their setup via NetCloud, it is rather nifty. My license expired a few months ago and I can no longer edit any of the settings so it's just locked in on cruise control with the last settings I had saved.

Haven't tried any satellite link options, 4g has been too cheap and decent for me to explore other options personally. I am on the waitlist for Starlink but from what I have researched, the current box is extremely power hungry (even if you get around the coverage limitations that apparently will be lifted soon). At a campsite I could see that being a great option though. In the next 5-10 years I think we could see some serious improvements on satellite
The issue then becomes silly games with shell corporations hiding how many homes people own, which pushes homes into the hands of larger landlords who can afford to pay someone to play those silly games.
My worry as a potential buyer is that rates might remain low and home prices will roll over. While I don't have a super high conviction that will happen, the potential risk of losing more of the value of something then my net worth greatly offsets the probable benefits of getting in now.
Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone might share the same physical tower though (while using different antennas and RRUs). But that's only an issue if there are severe interference issues there (on all the bands the author is connecting to) or if the tower itself suffers some catastrophic damage.
People carry large amounts of cash more often than you likely suspect-- not everyone lives their lives the same way you do!

Particularly when traveling out of state. And presumably officers are pretty good at profiling people of the relevant ethnic and economic status that make them more likely to be carrying substantial amounts of cash.

I think it's likely if ordinary police were getting this kind of information on a regular basis we'd know. There are just too many police to keep that kind of thing a secret.
uBlock Origin has been broken on macOS since Safari 13 / macOS Catalina [1].

If they ever get the port to work on a newer version of Safari, it could work on iOS.

[1]: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
In population or area?

And what is the significance of size?
Ng-News: 20. September 2021