skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Excel as a back end? Well now you can
I am currently writing a lowcode platform that allows defining backend as Excel functions. The format is not visually organized as spreadsheets or cells but differently. The platform also allows connecting different data sources and targets to it. Finally, you can connect to the backend itself using a REST API!

Some problems with Excel when people have tried to achieve the "excel as a backend":
- Excel was not designed to act as a (headless) backend - you should not do it because it will crash
- million rows limitation
- understanding what a Excel tool does is almost impossible to explain to other people, which makes sharing and maintaining the tool almost impossible

Using other types of spreadsheets like Google's is quite complex due to traditional way of representing data as cells and having the 2D format that is very functional for visual inspection but somewhat challenging when you interact through API: hopefully you take my word for it because I have done it.

I know many people have implemented many tools using Excel - with or without VBA. So my question is which kind of tools or services you would create with Excel if you could turn the an Excel sheet into a backend?
> Is it possible to have your job be 5 minutes from your home. How about in 5 years when your job is underpaid or unfulfilling? Is your next job also 5 minutes away? Or do you now have to move? And 5 years after that, when you're laid off?

Yes.

Further, most people don't live 5 minutes away now, even in car-centric developments. The average commute time has been, for centuries, 30 minutes one-way:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant

* https://archive.is/edypl / https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-29/the-commu...

It's just that with increased speeds the distance has gotten longer in recent decades.
it feels more like postgrest [1] than pocketbase [2].

--

1: https://postgrest.org/
2: https://pocketbase.io/
People will obvious hate the idea of “car-free cities”. Why would you push for the most extremist outcome that doesn’t exist anywhere?

Advocate for more realistic goals like less car dependence or pedestrian friendly cities.
I've lived in a number of cities across three continents and I tend to think that the idea of a "car-free" city is a quintessentially North American overreaction to a quintessentially North American problem.

Like yes Wired we know that the suburb and the American commute have some serious downsides and the US leaned way too much into this model during a period of high population growth.

However it's not like other approaches to urban planning have no downsides. I personally like the Asian model of high density and mixed use zoning but here are some realities that come with it: noise, more pollution, more construction, less space, commercial usage pushing up land values etc.

There is no one size fits all so I tend to think most US cities would benefit from just dialing back the size of some of the suburban wastelands out there, keeping density low to medium and re-zoning to allow certain less intrusive types of businesses. One compact urban core, a low to medium density mixed use ring and a suburban fringe perhaps. Yes people are still going to need to cars in this city but a lot of commutes, shopping trips etc. are likely to get shorter.

For somewhere like San Francisco there's probably a great argument for the type of development you see in Taipei or Tokyo where you lean heavily into commuter rail and the train stations become big multi-use complexes and the center(s) of your city. But this is a huge reorganization of people's lives and existing property development that there's going to be a lot of pushback against and it's not all going to be nimbyism.
I think PG addresses this subtlety where he says: "when you're young it's easier to know what you are interested in, than what people need." This inverts as you get older.
AR 3615 Produces an M7.4 Flare
I tried a few hours later and the page loaded okay.

After some reading I think it has to do with 1) how rigidly Firefox acts in the face of cert chain irregularities & 2) that the site was under heavy load (as indicated by other HN users).

If I'm right, I think Firefox should present more useful error info and have method to bypass - even if method is temp + >1-click.
Ohio yes, Oregon yes (Columbia River).
My biggest annoyance is when I get some tooling from some other team, and they're like "oh just extend this Python script". It'll operate on local files, using shell commands, in a non-reentrant way, with only customization from commenting out code. Maybe there's some argparse but you end up writing a program using their giant args as primitives.

Guys just write small programs and chain them. The wisdom of the ancients is continuously lost.
> [...] and not after the facts

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, they intentionally only cover topics retroactively, and preferably after the dust has settled. They're intentionally not intending to be many things, including a source of up to date news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...
The "gradual" part is hard because so many changes need to happen at once for a lot of these things to be feasible. Being able to get halfway to where I'm going affects me the same way as not being able to get there at all.

If you try to limit cars without adding better last-mile options (especially in the U.S. where huge portions of the population don't regularly walk even one mile at a time), people can't get anywhere, but if you try to roll out last-mile options without limiting cars, people either don't use them because they can still use cars, or they get hit by cars.

Add to that that everyone seems to feel time-crunched as it is (who do you know who feels like they're getting enough rest and doesn't describe themselves as "busy" any time you ask how things have been?), and the switch from "I could cover a mile in 2 minutes at 30mph vs. 20 mins at 3mph" and no one wants to change.
It’s not open source, just free as in beer.

Personally I do avoid add-ons that create special syntax in the md files so that if Obsidian ever goes shitty I’ll have an easier time migrating to whatever alternative.
> Because that scenario isn't universal, and while you can't think of a reason, others can.

Thank you very much for this island of sanity inside this topic’s sea of bewilderment. These comment sections always seem to end with someone up asking: “How could anyone like things I don’t like??” and then a bunch of commenters just shake their heads and conclude “Those poor souls, they don’t know how they are suffering.”

I’m ambivalent about cars. I could take ‘em or leave ‘em. What I won’t compromise on is I will never voluntarily live in a dense urban environment or really any structure with shared walls on shared property, including apartments, condos, townhomes, anything like that. Since affordable detached single family homes can’t really be found right next to the places I need to go, like work and shopping, I am forced to have a car. Or more accurately, my strong preference in housing type necessitates a car.

It’s not that I want my car and like to drive 15 minutes to shopping. My car is a pain in the ass that’s always broken down and driving is dangerous. My car is the price I pay to avoid living in a city.

EDIT: And to be perfectly clear: I am not against cities building themselves toward car-freeness. I support citydwellers making their cities bikeable and walkable! I just don’t want to live there.
You don't have to be his fan to hear his explanations about the studies and their methodology, it could be very helpful if one wants to understand what makes people report that they are happy.

As the people return from the army feeling they have done something significant to protect their country, and with the public discourse drifting away from the regular "Bibi vs. not Bibi" agenda, I fully expect Israel to report even higher levels of happiness next year.
Can you provide specific examples of cultures where targeted dick pics are shrugged off and nobody cares? That’s distinct from general nudity because it’s sexually focused and targets someone who is not a willing participant.

For example, despite your comments about Australia having tolerance for beach conditions (which as a north Southern Californian I approve of), it’s not like “laugh it off” is the government’s official position:

https://www.esafety.gov.au/young-people/receiving-unwanted-n...

I’m not sure PNG is a great example (https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1117642) but a quick search confirms that their 2016 “cybercrime” law covers both harassment and child grooming so it again appears that people recognize the distinction between traditional culture and targeted harassment like the case in question.
I wish. My savings are all going to go into a house, kids' college, and my retirement. Not everyone on HN is making $300-500k TC for a decade before having their first child.
Flooding Wetlands Could Be the Next Big Carbon Capture Hack
Yeah, that's about as far as I've ever been comfortable going in terms of validating email addresses too: some stuff followed by "@" followed by more stuff.

Though I guess adding a check for invalid dot patterns might be worthwhile.
Have they fixed that maximising a video shrinks the whole app to a tiny square? https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1420245 - there are workarounds, but still.

Or that you can't have more than 8 tiny home screen shortcuts at once, even on tablets - similarly to Chrome, probably for the same reason that you still have space for advertisements from Mozilla.
Question I have: is it just a bunch of cells wired up, or is there a BMS (battery management system) in there doing the things you need to do to make a battery safe and make it last: cell balancing is essential to make sure the pack will survive more then a few charges and rides before it will kill itself. Also I would not like a battery pack that does not switch itself off when voltages or currents get too high, which is a great way to start a thermal runaway. Not a safety issue, but important to make sure the battery is not abused is to prevent deep discharge voltage or charging the battery at too low temperature.
That idea was a fork of the "seperated" areas for everything idea - and it failed spectacularly. No shops in the blocks, no thirds places. Commie blocks have done the idea of a liveable city a disservice.
This is the same region that produced an M6.7 flare two days ago, on Mar 18 [0]. At that point it had just rotated into Earth view.

[0] https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/r2-moderate-hf-radio-blackout...
Dude that's a shortened link to the same article.

HTTP/2 301
location: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/03/dna-tests-incest/677791/
What is emergent gravity, and will it rewrite physics?
Actually, there is an old paper about this: https://research.google/pubs/using-a-market-economy-to-provi...
Or. Apparently, not.
The saddest part is that many legislations in other parts of the world try to blindly copy the european legislation, without any effort in thinking if it makes sense or not.
Interesting. Perhaps the error I received at the time was worded poorly giving me the impression there was a cost. Thank-you for the clarification. For now I will stick with LE as I do not have to create an account but I will keep ZeroSSL in mind should LE change things up.

[Edit] I remember now what led me to this conclusion. The error said I needed an account. I looked at the pricing page which indicated I had to pay for wildcards so I immediately looked for the flag to change back to LE. Looking at the pricing page I would still reach this conclusion. There should be some text that makes it obvious that using ACME allows for free wildcards.
There's also questions around a partner. Can you only have relationships with people whos career is near your current employer?
I don't want to belittle the author, but I am surprised, that people using a low-level language on Linux wouldn't know how Unix pipelines work or that reading one byte per syscall is quite inefficient. I understand that the author is still learning (aren't we all?), but I just felt it is a pretty fundamental knowledge. At the same time author managed to have better performance that the official thing had. I guess many things feel fundamental in the retrospect.
Be lucky?

I don't have any particular advice. I've been very lucky to join a few companies that were on the run up at the time but I never really knew at the time that they were going to be successful.

I just think blindly pursuing passion to the exclusion of profit will leave most people happy (or not) but impoverished and some people happy, lucky, and wealthy.

It was really just a tongue in cheek comment. I think Paul's advice is inspirational but it should be checked with a healthy dose of reality.
Moving from Homebrew to Pkgsrc
That makes me wonder if another one of my promotions was posted. My interview was the manager walking up to me while I was standing off to the side in the lunchroom waiting for someone else, and he simply said, “if anyone asks, I interviewed you.” He then walked away and I had a promotion.
How does that change the point being made? Front matter is supported essentially as a bucket of metadata. Front matter has varying degrees of usefulness without supporting tooling.
The power consumption of an FPGA strongly depends on the design you upload to it.
Imo the definition of piracy is rather clear - illegally copying of protected content that infringes the owner's copyright.

If not training, then possession perhaps?
I don't want to speculate why this is the case, but tech enthusiasts rarely have the social capital that it takes to move friend groups or local forums over to specific platforms.

The sad reality is that we can either accept the monopolizing forces like everyone else, or make ourselves apart from important social contexts.
> Honduras solicited investment in the form of charter cities, where corporations could buy pockets of land and run them however they wanted. Then a more socialist government came into power, reversed the law allowing them to exist, and refused to give them their money back.

No mention of democratically elected government being ousted by US-backed coup, or the fact that this single company is asking for a third of the country’s GDP.

On crypto: you seem very confident about your position, yet if you talk to actual people on the ground, you’ll get a different story than you are proposing. Crypto advocates are bragging about this very subject. It started with El Salvador, but goes well beyond one country now.

And for the record… I am not anti-crypto. I have been involved with bitcoin for 9 years.
I remember SQLite have been using inserts to implement import under the hood.
That would be great, but your forebears locked in a great prop 13 basis decades ago and it would be worth more than your raise to give it up. Or you're in faux social housing in the form of a rent controlled apartment and don't want to give up that subsidy.

Or there simply aren't homes to move to that are closer because every municipality in the area has tried to build offices rather than homes since the 1970s. And thus the office park around your new job is itself so big as to require a car to traverse it.
Yeah the problem is exactly the design of cities which make the car the best solution! The car is both the fastest and the most convenient if the roads are wide and the buildings are sprawled around. If you build the city tightly so it's easy to walk everywhere and everything is nearby, you a) don't need a car and more importantly b) there is no room for cars, this space is recovered for humans.

Disclaimer: my household owns two cars.
> You can: increase the price for patenting something. Google will think twice before spending 100K for hello world.

This is a terrible idea. Google will not think twice before spending 100k for a patent on hello world, but startups and small businesses would be priced out of the patent system entirely. All this would do is further increase and entrench the power of large corporations to the detriment of startups, entrepreneurs, SMBs, and ultimately, consumers.
It's far more cumbersome outside of cities because of distance/time and unreliable alternate transportation. It might as well not even be an option, if one decides to go without then they are consciously absorbing the inconvenience because it's an important ideological issue to them.
Usually mental models develop "organically" from when one was a n00b, without much thought, and sometimes it can take a long time for them to be unseated, even though it's kind of obvious in hindsight that the mental model is wrong (e.g. one can see that from "slow-program | less", and things like that).
Do you have sources about the "outages" ? (did not make the headlines internationally..)

It they all shut down because of "a payment system", then a simple explanation would be a failure of... the same payment system that they all happen to use ?

(It's not like Greggs is going to fully develop a payment system in house without relying on any infra, I suppose ?)
As a fellow (ex-)soviet from up north...

Soviet way of building sucked. You guys had it a tad easier, but in USSR-proper the standardisation sucked big time. It's damn fantastic now that building a custom private house in a legal way is doable, even without being a party elite. And soviet style of building wouldn't have happened without totalitarian control.

People aggregating and community is ripped away by interwebs. Although in USSR-proper it was iffy in any case. Yes, people spent a tad more time outside. But community building was very superficial and it was easy to get in trouble with KGB.

Some parts of society did enjoy the times. Other parts just enjoyed drinking their days away. And for many it was quite shitty.

Nowadays there're many more opportunities to enjoy the times. And I'm not talking about spending €€€ for fancy stuff. But the problem is there're too many modern distractions. Which would have been a thing wether soviet union survived or not. Just like soviets couldn't solve alcoholism which was the distraction #1 at the time.
I actually think it somewhat proves the opposite. It's clear they've tacked on a "make images of a diverse set of people" in the setup prompt, rather than baking diversity in properly and with more nuance.

Tbh, I think I'd rather have diverse founding fathers by default (obvious problem, fixable by changing your prompt), than DALL-E's current default, which seems to just draw all white people. (I just requested a few images of doctors, nurses and patients, and an elven council - every last person of the 103 it drew was white).
I can conjure up a voice in my head and make it say anything I want, such as "I like this picture", but it's a contrived and unnatural thing for me to do. It takes effort and "takes over" my whole brain. If a picture on the wall catches my eye, I will just enjoy it. Maybe that's why I struggle to answer "oh, what do you like about this picture?", because nothing about my experience had any relation to words at all.

I normally don't talk very much, maybe that's why? Maybe my though process is further removed from language than that of most other people?
They haven't said on what timeline the water will win.
> Or I can tell you that it in base 10, it has an infinite representation,

Does it really have an infinite representation? I can't imagine an infinite representation fitting on a page. I'm pretty sure you're representing it as 1/3 or 0.(3). Neither of those representations are infinite. They're only a few characters really.
If it's to be a technical thing, then however much you've done you're missing a large and crucial piece of the puzzle surely?

I would either try find a way to pay competitively (which may mean more than small/mid established firms, to compensate for the much higher risk that the job doesn't last very long) or try to find someone passionate about whatever it is you're doing who has the skills you don't have and wants to jump in with you.
This whole idea is fucking terrifying. Normalizing not having cars i.e. making people dependent on the government from birth. If you didn't understand what Americans were complaining about with gun laws you will soon.
>Tarr, noting that a more permanent seawall was not an option because hard structures like these are not allowed on Massachusetts beaches, said: “We’re managing a natural resource that protects a lot of interests.”

The interests of the wealthy.
When rich people make mistakes, they rarely suffer the consequences.

That is why they can arrogantly build housing along beaches without a thought to the outcome.

I on the other hand am forced to use my limited resources paying for their mistakes - whether they build homes on the beach or overinvest in commercial real estate.
"Political winds change" like a US backed coup in 2009 that put the guy in power who made these laws? What international institution protects against that? Are countries bound by law if it was made by an illegitimate government?
Usually Java apps come with Java these days, like how there's no independent way to run Electron apps, it just comes with the download of the app itself. There are tools that make it easy like jpackage and (toots my own horn) https://www.hydraulic.dev

If you want to just quickly run a fat jar then any will work. "openjdk21" is fine. The Zulu variant comes with JavaFX which simplifies things if your app needs that.
Disclosing your (potentially conflicting) interests does not automatically mean you've not been biased/incentivized to discover particular findings, pharmaceutical research is full of examples
> […] and personal liberty.

Ironic given that driving is not a right—you need a license—and is highly regulated (e.g., insurance), while you can walk and cycle without any of those things.

A cop can stop you in an automobile and ask for all sorts of documents, while doing the same walking or on a bus/tram/subway would probably be against most countries' constitutions.

See the Oh the Urbanity video '“15-Minute City” Conspiracies Have It Backwards':

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpXqY_j1m1U
the list specifically excludes EU countries

as always, it helps to maintain an identity in several geopolitical 'blocks', this time Montenegro worked :)
$40B is only 0.57% of Sam's $7T target, with the Saudis as one of the major investors.
PG has “copy” which would blow away bulk inserts. Other DB vendors have similar stuff for high-performance inserts. You would be much better off using those than using bulk inserts.
I assumed the interstate system would benefit from no longer being in a constant state of needing repair.

And I'm not sure if you're suggesting more train tracks would be laid in cities to divide communities? I assumed the discussion was about better utilizing the infrastructure we already have for rail.
YouTube requires disclosure of AI-generated content on the platform
Most cities in my country are car-free optional. I have multiple bus routes literally in front of my house. I could own a place downtown and go without a car, which im considering.

The cities which mandate to be car-free are doing so out of obligation. Mainly due to civil engineering decisions from 500 years ago which have screwed them over. They basically want to go back to horses.

So in reality, people hate the idea of car-free cities and choose thusly. There is no 'until they live in one'.