skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I absolutely hate Excel. It's not the number crunching that's the problem. Database -> Excel, Excel -> Database issues are almost unavoidable. In 2 months of working with SSIS packages, I encountered every one of these problems (I'm not the original author of this rant):

"Anyone who has worked with a database in a professional capacity for more than 20 minutes should have a list of at least 10 reasons why Excel is a monster. These probably include:

1. The way it butchers postal codes that start with a leading zero, like the town I grew up in (Granby, MA 01033 USA)

2. Dates of any kind

3. Serial numbers that have leading 0's (see #1)

4. The JET database driver for Excel. One large WTF.

5. SQL Server Integration Services Excel datasource. WTF squared.

6. The f-ing "just put an apostrophe" workaround. WTF.

6. a. The equally effective "format as text before you paste" workaround. Gives the illusion of working, only to break later.

7. Save as CSV, then reopen the CSV in Excel. Lots of magical things happen there.

8. While on the topic, CSV files, which are a whole WTF on their own.

9. The Jet database driver's "type guess rows" registry entry. WTF factorial.

The root of all this: Excel makes things that look like tables, and tables are useful for data. There is no other program that is as widespread AND makes things that look like tables, so people use Excel to make tables of data. And it's in fact really, really bad at that. It was designed for ad-hoc numerical analysis and got appropriated as a database loading and reporting tool.

I think it's actually damaged the GNP of whole nations, this Excel program. It'd be interesting to know how badly."
Slow, crashed within minutes of using it. It's not very pretty either. I'll stick with Adium/Jabber hooks but was really hoping for something good here.
Worst app ever. Please QA before launch (even it's a beta).
The article described the kids working on "weed farms" in exchange for "beer, food, and weed". Maybe they're selling the gleanings?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning
IOS 6.1 brings back bug that gives anyone access to your contacts, photos
How do you scale something that decreases in value with every new customer it acquires? You can only pump so many fake video promotions into a market before it's completely saturated and people start to resent the constant assault of your ads. Not to mention the fact that every Tom, Dick and Jane with a camera is already pushing their own videos every chance they get.

Then there's this:

> “All [Jimmy Kimmel] had done was expose [the Double Rainbow] video to a couple hundred million people who would find this video interesting to them,” Debelov says. (Actually, [Kimmel] tweeted it to his 90,000 Twitter followers). “We’ve taken that process, and reversed engineered it. We can’t guarantee your video will go viral because it all depends on your content, but we can get it in front of a million, two million, half a million, whatever your budget is – we can get you in front of that audience.”

You've reverse engineered the power of celebrity? Highly doubtful. When a comedian with the clout of Jimmy Kimmel calls something the "funniest video in the world"[1], his fans are going to watch that video. When those same people see a video advertisement at the bottom of a blog post or in one of their mobile apps, they're going to ignore it. Hell, even celebrity has its limits -- Kimmel's suggestions would be ignored if he started posting random videos rather than specific links of his own choosing.

Anyone born after 1980 has been conditioned since adolescence to ignore online advertisements. It's gotten to the point where you have two choices: 1.) Make your ad so obtrusive that it might actually cost you users, or 2.) Don't infuriate your users, and settle for a CTR of .01% on a good day. I can only see this service reinforcing that conditioning.

[1] http://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/17665533038
> See? I can return snark for snark. Now let's actually discuss some physics.

Not snark. Also, already knew about the possible non-intuitive results with water.

> If the highway trip is taken at 60 mph it is much harder for a slow trip to take less energy.

Now do you understand that speed hurts efficiency?

Hmmm, putting words in my mouth to spin it so it seems like my original position is actually yours and imply that I don't know a different basic bit of physics. (You can check my recent comment history.)

Nope, definitely wouldn't hire you as a journalist.
Steam for Linux Sale
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Come move to Houston! :D
Too Engrained
But be honest: part of the reason you lived that lifestyle was how romantic it is. If there were a more sexy way to convince young people that you don't have to sleep in a dank moldy shell of a building and eat out of dumpsters to have a positive effect on the world, there'd be less of this type of living-off-the-land. I'm glad you bought into capitalism, too :)
> Code which is executing a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes without the user of that code (the web developer) being aware

But isn't this the whole point of a framework? That stuff gets done for you so you don't have to write everything from the ground up?

Plus if you want to know exactly how everything is done, you can see it for yourself. As we all know Rails is open source and the code is perfectly readable for anyone that knows Ruby.
Right. To take it to a somewhat ridiculous extreme, what about something like this?

"I just found out that this company was infecting all their users with bubonic plague."

"Stop complaining. It was free!"
It doesn't have a rails server on the car. The car communicates to Teslas datacenter, which is where the Rails servers are. You then query the API by querying the datacenter.
I've never really had a thorough introduction to IRC. Is it correct to assume that it's 100% ephemeral, that all conversations, questions, answers are gone when you log out?

If that's the case, I'm puzzled as to why it would maintain so much traction when the record of communication can be so valuable (e.g. people searching the log vs asking a question that has been answered many times... )
I think in the other thread about this, someone posted something to the effect that the spreadsheet with the flawed formula was not questioned or tested because it provided justification for the kind of reckless, short-sighted risk-taking behavior that the decisionmakers at the bank wanted to promote anyway. Spot-on. In organizations like this, the decisionmakers will always massage models and abuse statistics to support the decision they already know they want to make anyway. That's why it's important that they are forced into a structure where testing and oversight are required.
I have a friend who owns a Tesla Model S who says the regen is not as efficient in stop and go traffic as lighter vehicles. The Prius and Leaf are thousands of pounds lighter. (He still loves his car.)

He says the Tesla seems more efficient on county highways than side roads because the losses from accelerating the vehicle's over 4500 pound weight exceed losses from air resistance at those speeds.
There's something in between wasting talent and becoming a worker bee. I was part of a similar community and found it disenchanting because I wanted to make new things. So I left, and now I make a lot of awesome things, and I'm much happier. I can make contributions and put them on the internet to impact people far and wide. These kids create strong, loving communities and that's as much or more than most people contribute to the world, but I personally felt like I was wasting my particular talents. So I left, But it wasn't to become a worker bee. It was to achieve self-actualization on my own terms, which is the same thing these kids are doing for themselves.

The perception that embarking on a career that you think will make the world a better place is selling out or becoming a drone is really harmful. Being a professional member of a hippy/punk community or an avowed member of the CrimethInc Ex-Worker's Collective or a Slingshot producer or a freegan is a valid choice, but it is hardly more pure than anything else.
Your last sentence hides another option which is the route we took: outsource devops. It cost us about $2000 in consultant fees for a fully setup system, easy to expand and add hardware to, and much more cost effective long term than AWS or Heroku. Our guy runs a small ops company who have 24/7 on-call. It's really the perfect solution.
Try both. Build something simple like a todo list in both, see which you prefer and then use that.
Official Steam client for Ubuntu released
It's called a distraction cover-up.

You release some documents that more or less confirm a long standing suspicion, then while all the sci-fi nerds are poring over the documents you do something that would otherwise be carefully scrutinized by these same nerds if they weren't busy looking for hints of little green men in the released documents.
I don't think most people can see anything there other than that he worked for Google, since we're only 3rd degree connections.
Garret are there any plans to offer a self-hosted HipChat solution similar to how Jira and Confluence have self-hosted pricing?

My company is limited to our chat products due to HIPAA compliance and we would love to use this product for company chat but host it on our own infrastructure.
The leading zeroes problem is a constant thorn in my side. You basically have to never, ever open a CSV file in Excel.
It is very nice to develop for.

Firefox isn't terrible but its developer tools always seem a little clunkier than Chrome's.
<off-topic>To all the Font wonks out there who tell me about the importance of the font to establish branding...blah,blah,blah. The font on this site, while cool looking is very hard to read.</off-topic>

<on-topic> Something I tell junior devs when making reports, if the data can't be exported to excel, then it isn't a report. It doesn't matter how cool your filter/sorting capabilities are, how good you make the data look, your charts could be beautiful to behold. If you can't export the data to excel then you haven't done anything of value as far as the custom is concerned, because they will ONLY look at the data if it is in Excel. In many companies, that is the only feature that is used (the export to excel).
What would the ramifications be if the PSF loses the rights to the name "Python" in Europe? Would it force the language itself to be rebranded for all European usage?
I think cap and trade establishes some type of baseline ownership of pollution rights. For instance, some company who's been in business for a while, say an electrical power generation company, gets an initial allotment of credits. If they need more, they buy them from another company. If they have too many, they sell them. The corruption happens during the initial allotment, and the law will probably also be written to favor established interest who own an exchange where they will charge fees for every transaction.

A tax is just money going into the Treasury, plain and simple. Then you at least have a chance to curb corruption before the government spends it.
I believe over-engineering is also a culprit here. We had a similar situation in JSON handling in browser. Some over engineered feature allows custom objects to replace built in object for lists, allowing XSS through JSON parser. The solution was to make every REST API to start with a top level dictionary object. It just sounds arbitrary over engineering!!
> Advantages of this proposal

> * Preserves the historic structure and function of the Electoral College.

I think we may be sort of putting the cart before the horse here. The purpose of the electoral college was to get the states to agree to adopt the system (right?). Now we're supposed to preserve the thing meant to get the states to agree by destroying the states?
It was totally sexy.
I think the answer is free copies of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon in every soup kitchen ;)
Have you seen Twitter's "Sponsored Tweets", Facebook's "Sponsored Stories", Amazon's "Inspired by your browsing history". Ditching the word "advertising" is nothing new and we all use sites like these every day.
What is the source/what are you doing for each request? Are you going over the net for each request? 2k/sec really isn't that much to get excited about, I get 1k or so on Django on a $20 Linode. HTTPS?
We dont do that at all, though I'm 90% sure the hipchat API supports that.

What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.
Very cool.

I get email notifications so this doesn't help me much.

I really wish there were iPhone/Android apps for Stripe. It could be as simple as receiving push notifications, looking up customers and issuing refunds. Doesn't need anything else.
that was the the lazy ones amongst us :)
Because that's how most options that are likely to make money are rolled out these days. Disqus are not the only one using these tactics.

I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will know the one I am talking about. But it's things like pre-selecting paid for delivery options, adding travel insurance to flight cost etc etc to drive up costs but then make it not obvious how to remove those items... kind of reminds me of those tactics.

Most of the things rolled out in Facebook I found out through HN or other friends posting. It's not always obvious (though in this case it looks like everyone else got he email except the OP)
As a geek, I actually think Excel is one of the few really nice things Microsoft has created (I realize it wasn't the first spreadsheet, but MS gets credit for taking it mainstream).

It's one of the few general-purpose programs that really empowers ordinary users.

Excel is essentially a functional programming environment used by hundreds of millions of people.
What do you think the 'j' in node.js stands for?
> If everyone shares the same underlying implementation, then standards are meaningless: The standards body can say whatever they want, but in practice all that will matter is what actually runs on the single implementation.

How is that different from the case today? The web is moving much faster than the Standards and their inaction has lead to their dwindling importance. The W3C hasn't even ratified HTML5 yet (their hoping to do so in 2014!).

Within the time frame of the W3C discussing HTML5 Google started Chrome and has shipped 24 versions. Not only that, but they aren't waiting around for the W3C to vote and have shipped a ton of emerging tech: WebGL, WebRTC, NaCL, Web Speech, Web Intents, etc etc etc.

How is this bad? We're building stuff now instead of waiting around for a decade.
One additional thought: anyone who buys patent troll insurance instantly becomes a highly-cooperative target. Why fight it? Why ignore it? Just send the contact info for your insurance company, and let them pay it.
That businesses may use Amazon services like FBA does not mean they aren't directly competing with Amazon's B2C.
But there is a state of Chicago on the map, at least it appears that way. Chicago is a state nestled within the state of Gary.
There's a lot more to it than mobility. For a good overview, which also applies the principles to business, a great book is Certain to Win by Chet Richards, who collaborated with John Boyd on the manuscripts before Boyd died.

The most famous principle Boyd formulated is the OODA loop, which says that if you can observe the situation, figure out what's going on, decide what to do and take action faster than your enemy can, you probably win. A lot of the book is about how you do that faster, in a business situation. Some of it is about making your enemy slower (but that's more difficult to apply in business).

It's true that it didn't all start with Boyd. Some goes back to Sun Tzu, and the Germans applied it to great effect with the Blitzkrieg.
Yep. Opening a CSV file in excel:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215591

What a nightmare. Do they not realize how many DB tables start with 'ID'? And CSV is too common a format to just completely ignore. It's not always up to us.
"He kept fielding from clients at the time was “can you help me make these videos go viral?” "No... but..."

In search marketing, the question is "Can we get to top of Google?"

And the answer can be yes if the client is willing to go pay-for-play (AdWords).

So these guys basically built their own platform to do pay-for-play, I'm assuming.
Adobe launches responsive design app Reflow
From the Heroku docs:

[...]
Request distribution

The routing mesh uses a random selection algorithm for HTTP request load balancing across web processes.
[...]

If the algorithm is random, the load balancing simply doesn't happen, am I wrong?

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-routing#request-d...
Does starting a business threaten your love life?
It's sort of ironic and myopic for this little service to want to infringe or start an issue with the Python, or even the programming community at large. They do cloud hosting? So then I imagine a good portion of their business deals with developers? That's a pretty good tact, I wonder how that will work out for them. I wonder if they think they will get good publicity out of this.
Agreed, that's some serious melodrama thrown at people who are just looking for help testing their app that's not ready for general release. Big deal.
Sorry, I meant per month.
Whether you warned users of this change or not, to me, that isn't the problem. The issue is that they are stealth ads.

As jacques mentioned, and the screenshot shows, the ads look like they are personal recommendations by jacques, and this is what is quite sneaky/crappy about this whole change.

If you went the route of using other language like sponsored ads, I think you were in the right, it's your service and you can change it, but this is indeed quite sneaky. It's like me going on tv and saying Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Jordan recommend my app. It's a lie.
“Better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy”
Some of my technical peers don't have the slightest idea what IRC is (23, 25 and 26 year olds, doing software development for a living)
The biggest criticisms I've seen so far revolve around two things:

1) Many existing polluters can't afford much of a limit, but we don't want them to go bankrupt, so every proposal offers tons of 'free' allowances, which will inevitably be allocated more by congressional pull than metrics. It also favors existing polluters and discourages new entrants, even though they may be cleaner than the existing market.

In Europe these free credits (and their unpredictability) caused the value of carbon prices to fluctuate wildly, which undermined parts of the program

2) <This criticism is stupid to me, but it gets around> - The credits will just turn into one more big derivatives market, and be engineered to obfuscate real polluting by clever gaming of the trading system.

These are definitely fixable issues, but it's reasonable to be worried that implementation may be so complicated that it has nasty unforeseen consequences, since setting up a new market and regulating it well is rarely easy.
Yes, Campfire likes that, too. I'm talking about automated messages, though.

What I'd like is to have a list of project names I am interested in, let the bots use the project names in their messages, and then have the client ping me when something interesting is mentioned.

Propane has custom mention support where you can enter a bunch of strings, but it doesn't really work.
> Here's one thing I don't understand. Geeks love Smalltalk image-based persistence. Geeks hate Excel documents. Don't they have the same problems?

They have neither the same benefits nor the same problems, though they have some overlap in each.

Also both the "Geeks love Smalltalk" and "Geeks hate Excel" generalizations are over-generalizations, and the set of geeks for whom the former is valid are not the same set of geeks for whom the latter is valid (though, again, there is some overlap.)
I'm not so sure this is a playing field leveling as much as it is someone who grew massively from eating a certain fruit scorching the field the fruit grows on after he's grown into a giant.

(I say this as a fan of Amazon -- I use them all the time and will continue to do so, but this is a purely shrewd corporate move and shouldn't be confused with making things fair).
HipChat is more than an IRC server - it's a fully searchable web-based chat archival system, as well as a file transmission and sharing app backed by S3. It's also fully mobile-compatible and will do proper message routing to multiple devices owned by the same user, as well as temporary message caching/retry if your device is unreachable when a message is sent. etc etc. The list goes on.

None of it impossible to replicate in-house, but I dare a non-technical person to replicate HipChat's stack.
I wonder what car insurance actuaries would make of this?
> they mean that Rails has drawn that line quite far toward the abstraction side, which is true

Can you give a concrete example of this?
I agree that would be a great way to structure the updates from the perspective of the blog service provider.
there is only one electron, the chuck norris electron, and it does not burn
Yes, the Senate is a massive structural advantage for the Republican party and it's policies in the US.

It is an advantage that violates the principle of one person one vote and equal representation.

People that believe in equal representation as a founding principal of democracy are justifiably outraged by this assault to democratic principles.

The Senate was a compromise to form the union at the start, and it has evolved with time. The 17th amendment gave the people the right to vote for their senators directly, previously state legislatures elected senators for the people.

The basic truth that all men are equal and there should be one vote for one man supersedes the privilege of some citizens, in some states, having more political power than other citizens in other states.

Citizens of large states do not deserve to be discriminated against in the legislature while at the same time subsidizing rural states. The rural states get more than they give in taxes.

It's just not right. The Senate, in it's current stage of metamorphosis, is a basic violation of democratic principles and the time has come to alter or abolish it. A quixotic cause to rally for no doubt, but a right and good cause for anyone that keeps a candle burning in the window, that one day America will live up to its promise and potential.
I would say that you're pointing to a bug and calling it a feature, personally.
Feel free to comment on this offer :-)
The title of this submission: "Chrome devs deny Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS"

Quotes from the actual article:

"I'm somewhat skeptical of this."

"It would be nice if some Chrome OS folks more knowledgeable than I could shed light on this, because I truly don't know."

Analysis: The linked article has one developer (not "Chrome devs") confessing that he simply doesn't know what the facts are (not "den[ies] Jeff Nelson's role in the creation of Chrome OS")

Conclusion: Don't write your own submission headline, you will get it wrong.
++ on the notifications. my biggest beef with hipchat is it will send emails of conversations as i am having the conversations. email notifications when I am away is nice, kind of annoying when you are actively typing in the window.
And my point is that a cost that’s 1 to 2 percent of your revenue every month is worth looking into and possibly reducing. Even if you decide to keep it for the time being, it’s worth revisiting every couple of years or so.
Taken out of context, you're completely right.