skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't celebrate how empowering Excel is because it becomes a giant mess in almost no time at all. Then it's dumped on people like us to fix.

Excel is a fantastic tool, no doubt. It's powerful, flexible and quick to knock up. But it scales abysmally. And that's through no fault of it's own because spreadsheets aren't meant to scale, they're meant to convey tabulated data.
Lawmakers Propose Revisions to CISPA to Ease Privacy Concerns
or python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
Really? How? Do sites of any complexity even work anymore in IE6?
Would your bank let you walk in and withdraw $10,000 from your own account with a ski mask or panty hose over your head? Even if you knew your account number and password?

Probably not.
I play LoL through Wine on Lubuntu. It runs perfectly without any configuration. It was the first thing I tried after 'apt-get install wine'

In fact, it runs better than it does under Windows 7, probably because Lubuntu uses 2GB less RAM and considerably less CPU than Windows 7.
The hype and "over-investing" is deliberate.

Why?

Well, let's face it, the most revolutionary things have all started sounding silly and insane. People will buy things over computers without having actually seen or touched them? Humans will fly? Will travel to the moon? Everything is actually well modelled by equations that imply that everything is a wave and has probability it exists?

So just because YOU think it sounds crazy or insane, doesn't mean it doesn't have a chance at something big.

After all, who would want to communicate in 140 characters only, or have a real time feed of everything their friends do, or want tiny square pictures on their phone?

On the subject matter, I've lived in SF for a few years now and I was born in Canada. In the US people will give you a chance, in Canada companies want to know what you have done and get you to do more of it.
The point of those mini-stores (store-within-a-store) that make Target so successful is that you can possibly get things that you don't have access to. It brings people looking and those people will hopefully see your other stuff while they are there.

JCPs that are big enough to have a Sephora are typically in a large enough mall that already has a Sephora. What new customers are you getting into your store then? Why go into a JCP if you just need something from Sephora? They are also typically located in the front of the store. Go in, get Sephora, walk out. They don't even see any of your other stuff (although I don't think the Sephora consumer overlaps with the JCP consumer).
$25k per copy, by my reckoning. I mean, seriously, if it flies in court for them, why not for her? She should/could push for ten figures of punitive damages.
I've seen people submit multiple times using question marks in the URL e.g. submitting once with www.yoursite.com/?1 and then later with www.yoursite.com/?2.

Not sure about HNs policy on that though.
Yep, we're working on something similar to BetterWorks. I don't want to say publicly what I think about the way that company was run, but their failure is more validation for me (in that they were able to get the model to work at some scale, but not the scale they wanted) rather than a warning.

My idea is about creating and managing perks that CAN scale, and using auxiliary businesses to provide them. Since our perks are about things that make employees happy, tangible things are only one subset of the things we're going to offer, and all of those will be provided by large providers acting as partners. Only some select local businesses will be offered for very specific reasons.
For some users, there are no viable alternatives.
I'd managed to repress the nightmares that came from living through scenarios just like those depicted in the comic. I guess I'll just stay up all night tonight!
What I haven't seen recently is an explanation of "Reasons I like Postgres Over Mysql." It seems like after a long period of stagnation, postgres suddenly became hugely popular among startups again in spite of some of the things that I consider its core failings not being fixed (mainly: an even more expensive per-connection model than mysql and extremely painful replication, largely offloaded to third party tools).

Is it because of HStore? Heroku using it? The Oracle buyout of Inno and then Mysql?

Mysql 3.x was quite awful (other than replication), but by 5.x it had started getting good, and now the forks are doing some fantastic work. So it surprises me.
The week just started and the price is already double what it was this time last week. It only has to go up 50% more before the end of the week.

Looks like my first prediction wasn't such a long shot, eh?
That, by the way, is why catering has been so puzzling in this equation. I don't want to organize catering myself for the very reasons you mentioned. I want to have 1 set of sales people: people selling to businesses to offer perks, and then as many scalable partners as possible offering the perks.
Paypal is crap! It's a wakeup call for you to move on to another payment service. They froze my account 4 months ago with over $1k in it. Reason? Because I had a donation button on my site, and my site wasn't a registered non-profit organization. Well no shit, it's a hobby/fan site and I need a way to pay for my servers and such. Not to mention, I did pay taxes on those so call "donation". Sorry for the rant but just move on; you can't win against their stellar dispute department.
Connecting to a payment service through an anonymizing VPN service (or your own VPN running on some server in a data center) is like walking into a bank in a ski mask. You look like the criminals, and you're likely sharing IP space with them. If you were just VPN'ing to your home or office network, I doubt that would ever arouse any suspicion.

Telling: Type "PayPal VPN" into Google and what you get are VPN services advertising how they help you sign up for PayPal when you're normally forbidden, with FAQ pages like "why is my PayPal account now terminated".
Deflationary spiral - Bitcoin
If Disney is the one selling the bags, surely they are the only party it would make sense for the artist to make a claim against?

If I, A, lie to you, B, and as a result you take a supposedly-harmless action which is in fact a tort against aggrieved party C, I would expect you to be liable to C, and myself to be liable in turn to you. What did I do to C?
I'd be happy to sign up for 2-factor auth, but it doesn't work with Google Voice.

The whole reason I use Google Voice is to keep my phone number independent of the device/carrier I happen to be using. It's my permanent address in telephony. Whatever number is on my SIM card is just temporary. If I used 2FA, I'd run the very real risk of locking myself out of my account the next time I change carriers.

Knowing how Apple expects its users to commit to its product portfolio all-or-nothing, I don't expect an Android app, but it would be nice if Facebook and Apple would at least include Google Voice support in their SMS verification tools. (As for 2-factor authentication, they really should support the Authenticator project like everyone else.)
No, don't, unless you want bad things to happen when a whole bunch of corner cases start sprouting up. I did this for a while and ultimately gave up after seeing the error rate spike on my server. There are lots of people out there using stuff which just does not get the protocol-independent // scheme. I went back to doing either the whole thing (http[s]://host/path) or a relative thing (/path) but nothing in-between.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/09/15/rel/
I don't think that the classification being done is "good" or "bad". Rather we classify things as "okay to eat" and "not okay to eat". Vegetarians are not classifying animals as "good" and plants as "bad". Fruititarians are not classifying plants and animals as "good" but things that fall off plants as "bad". Everyone is doing the same classification: "am I okay with eating this, or am I not"; the only trick is that different people come up with different answers to that question.

To be clear, my classification is tuned very far to one extreme. That is to say, I would eat anything given the opportunity (in some cases necessity comes into play).
It describes the real differences among Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Data Analytics, Classification, Pattern Recognition and Data Science, Statistical Analysis, Data Warehousing, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Artificial Intelligence and Business Intelligence etc....
This reads like a big fat advertisement for CDN Connect more than it does a valid argument for ditching save for web in photo editing applications. "Save for web is redundant, use my paid product instead", I'll bite...

Considering photo editing applications like Photoshop serve many purposes; magazine photography, advertising, hobbyist and web user I don't see the reason to remove such a fundamentally and very relevant feature like, 'Save for Web'. Not everyone takes photos for display on the web and some people like control over the finer details of their imagery before saving them out (that includes for web).

Not once did Adam Bradley offer any sort of compelling argument here. His argument is that people upload large images and resize them in the browser, only developers who don't care about the end-user do this. CMS's like Wordpress handle image resizing out-of-the-box and for free too, who would have thought? Developers have been cutting out images at a fixed size since I can remember, why is it all of a sudden a problem we need to throw money at? Considering the file size difference between an image saved for web and an image saved for desktop use or for printing in a magazine can sometimes be tens of megabytes opposed to kilobytes, I'd rather save out web optimised versions of my images when I need them instead of relying on a paid product which is essentially doing what Photoshop or Fireworks would do in behind-the-scenes anyway.

CDN Connect sounds like an over-glorified and by the looks of it, expensive image resizing and content delivery network service, I'm not impressed.
Check out Bitcoin, currency for grownups.
3-D Printing Is Ready for Surgery
My buddy has a Samsung Smart TV featuring a large "smart" remote. On one side, there is your standard remote control layout. On the other side is a QWERTY keyboard and other buttons meant for controlling media apps like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and YouTube... perfect idea for working with search boxes. The problem is NONE OF THE APPS recognize the keyboard. Seriously... why did they bother?
Tell HN: Bitcoin's 8 decimal places are preventing its adoption.
Bitcoin's real problem is the "BTC" unit is divisible to 8 decimal places ( http://bitcoin.org/en/about ). Why is that a problem? Most people don't know what a decimal place is and can't divide. So imagine asking people to not only divide, but divide to 8 decimal places every time they do any sort of financial transaction, no matter how insignificant. For example, a $4 frappuccino costs 0.02116402 BTC.

The solution: A unit I'm calling "BTU", Bitcoin Units. It's nothing more than a BTC divided to 8 decimal places, making it an indivisible currency unit like a yuan. No division, no decimal places, just integers. Everybody can easily understand it.

Any reason why we can't accept this new term?
That's trendy but not for the masses. How much does the average JCPenney customer weight?
I recently did exactly the same thing with my PS3. I had an hour to kill, but it took overnight downloading the updates.

For comparison, I can download from Steam at over 5Mbps. The PS3 took 20 minutes to download a 50MB update.

My TV on the other hand, which is the pre-'smart' generation of Samsung TVs - does a reasonable job of streaming media from the network.
You'd be surprised by the number of technology companies big and small that can't wrap their heads around remote workers.
But the JCP consumer wants their coupons. Johnson shouldn't have tried to bring JCP up to Macy's or Nordstrom, it was never going to happen because Macy's and Nordstrom aren't giving up those customers.

Kohl's and Target have stolen the JCP consumer. Name recognition on clothes, low prices and sales, streamlined and targeted advertising, quality for a fair price. It's not that hard to do, Johnson just didn't know how to do it.
I don't get why Excel specifically gets so much bashing. It is an excellent tool, a very versatile tool. The problem lies with the users, as always. This hasn't changed. It's just that the customer base is enormous compare to other tools. Excel can do marvels in the right hands. I could use something else because I'm literate with a larger set of tools than my peers in the actuarial world, but again, to what point if I'm the only one who can reproduce what I did. In Excel, it's pretty easy to track back what was done. Excel strength lies in its ability to empower me with tool to produce a reproducible report in a matter of minutes from database output to presentation. Stop complaining about Excel and start teaching to people how to use it properly.
thats a fantastic explanation, thanks
If done by private enterprise, the spectre of blackspots in non-revenue generating areas that would entrench rich/poor district disadvantages is what I'm concerned about.
Being in Canada also means flying under the radar, which can be a good thing for long term viability of your product.

My company does 100x the traffic of our nearest competitor but you'll never see a TechCrunch article about us, since we're in Toronto. So there's no pressure for overnight success and you can work diligently towards making a better product instead of meeting unreasonable expectations.
I've come to a situation in the past, where there would be endless lines upon lines of PHP code intermixed with random static functions and HTML markup.

I'm talking 40, 2000 LoC files that all called the database whenever they felt like it, all echoed out data and modifed each other in wierd ways.

I spent about two weeks trying to untangle the mess and threw the towerl in at day 15. We just rewrote it using a PHP framework that not only let us query the database using a sane ORM, but also gave the project STRUCTURE and added mantainability value.

Sometimes a rewrite is the best cure. ;)
I would honestly lawyer up in this instance. Disney from what I've seen are usually very thorough with their IP, I'm surprised something like this has happened and I am sure it's an honest mistake they will rectify. There is definitely a case here, but it doesn't seem as straightforward as some might think it is.
Johnson leaving is also a lesson that cut-and-paste strategy (applying what worked at Apple as-is to JC Penny without considering the differences between the two target customer bases - like the 'no sale' strategy) almost never works.
I suspect that at some point any link to "www.yoursite.com" will automatically be [dead].
My TV, which is fairly new and a well known brand, takes 30 seconds to boot up from a warm standby state, and several minutes from a cold state.

What's more annoying than that though is that it takes a full second to change channels due to the needed signal capture and buffering for DTV signals.

The interface is abysmal and even with a HDMI cable and the BluRay set to the right resolution (a chore in itself), I still have to manually change the aspect ratio for some DVDs, which takes around 20 button presses and 20 seconds or so to accomplish, and then needs to be reset when done watching.

As a result I watch TV maybe an hour a week if that. Which is fine by me, but I doubt I'm the only one that has given up.

I remember having a TV made in the 1950s that had a rack of vacuum tubes in the back. It took less time to "warm up" than modern TVs take for their OS to boot. People complained a lot about the warm up time. And changing channels always happened instantly.

This is before we even get to "smart TV" features.
Yup, can't wait to not see these articles on PayPal any more. Granted, we'll probably see another type of article start to appear with frequency (e.g. I lost my wallet).
On the other hand, sometimes you've wound up with 100k lines of bash and things are breaking regularly in odd ways.
I strongly recommend following that up with John Repy's work, "CML: A higher concurrent language" (1991) [1]. It has an amazingly simple and straight-forward form of compositional concurrency that I would love to see in a language today (Rust?).

Repy later went on to start Manticore [2], but it seems stuck in Research Land.

Let me know if you need help getting the paper.

[1] - http://dl.acm.org.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/citation.cfm?id=...

[2] - http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/
What else would one expect from a commodity business? The manufacturers are desperate to differentiate themselves from each other and from their own previous year's models, but their strengths are most certainly not in software, still less in UX. The manufacturers see their margins shriveling and are casting about, but it's pointless. See Panasonic making noise about getting out of the panel business -- it doesn't matter that they make the best TV sets; they can't possibly compete against contract LCD OEMs.

Of course the future is TVs as monitors; but getting there will be painful.
This is cool and all, but you probably want to compare April of this year to April of last year (and previous years). My company (Virtualmin, 76 on the list) has pretty big fluctuations throughout the year, with early months (specifically January) being the best, and December being the worst. So, if you were to compare December to January for us, you'd see a huge spike upward...but if you compared January to February, you'd see a small drop downward (and that trend might even continue throughout the year...though it seems to not be happening that way between March and April).

I'm just saying this is a pretty limited view of these sites, and it'd be difficult to draw useful conclusions from it. Our traffic probably isn't growing faster than more recent YC companies, even if we show up above them on the list. We're a pretty stable entity at this point. Not to say I didn't get a kick out of seeing our numbers getting better at a pretty rapid clip, even knowing more detail about what our traffic actually looks like.
No, but they'd let you go through the drive-through ATM in a rental car.
I don't see why I should expose myself to avoid being flagged.

Don't you explain this yourself? If few PP users use VPN and a large portion of fraudsters use VPN, I think we can chalk this one up to cold math despite the is/ought problem.
You clearly haven't used the ViewSonic monitors I have at work. They take a good 20 seconds to turn on from standby.

It's most frustrating as I use them as externals for my laptop. The laptop display springs in to life, but as I have one of the externals set as primary I'm waiting a while before I can see the unlock screen.
What's the edge case with you guys? It is cool to use Redis and come up with exotic architectures for common use cases (is there anything more common than forum threads and comments?). However, there will come a point where it just won't make sense to pay 10x more (in hardware and maintenance) than you need to, to store old, rarely read posts.
Comparing absolute change in Alexa rank seems fundamentally broken to me. It weights massively to early companies.

Snipshot's rank rose by nearly 80,000 - that's undeniably good, but 37 of the companies on the list had a previous rank of less than 80,000...

I would suggest comparing the delta of the log of rank, this gives a more interesting (to me) metric...

For example this bumps Newsblur up from a "meh" 23 to 1! And AnyPerk from an exciting 6 down to a not so cool (unless you like catches) 22 (not picking on AnyPerk, it's just the most demoted of the original top 10)

Under this change of methodology the biggest winner is WorkFlowy from 61->24, biggest loser's are Circle (39-67); FundersClub (40-68); and Cloudant (44-72)
"during his helm as CEO, shares of J.C. Penney have plummeted by 51 percent while the company's market cap dropped from $6.84 billion to $3.49 billion."

No board will put up with that.
Show HN: My fake tech news podcast
Oh god that was 5 minutes of constant shooting my tea out of my nose laughing. Never heard of that talk before, thx for the lols.
Actually, representative democracy started with the English Revolution, in 1688. It was carried out so competently that no one got shot, and hardly anyone has heard of it.
The Great Debate: THE STORYTELLING OF SCIENCE
But can't Canadians move to the valley too with the TN visa?
I absolutely agree on Oracle, it's the biggest gripe on my post. Unfortunately I was on my phone so I couldn't convey everything I wanted just the way I wanted.
I really hope this is sarcastic, because CSP is the basis of almost all concurrency (and certainly pretty much every formal model of concurrency).

If it needs some implementation in your language du jour before you consider reading it, it seems lacking to me.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather inspire them to long for the infinite immensity of the sea."
I absolutely agree with you regarding seasonality, I simply don't have a snapshot from a year ago. But a year from now I will be able to do this now that I am collecting the data each month.
I had this idea for a really simple poster/product generator. Here it is.
All you have to do is type in the text.
Time Refines Code
Presumably, the sites on Alexa follow a power law (based on traffic), so deltas on log-rank would indeed make a lot of sense. Of course... the data itself is quite interesting. Mad props to Danielle for compiling all of it -- this makes running our own quick calcs that much easier.
The Mendeley desktop client is a great cross platform way to manage research papers. I really hope Elsevier doesn't screw it up.
Those already have the name "satoshis." It's the 4th sentence in the Wikipedia Bitcoin page.
I really don't get it why people over here are heads over heels about Apple. They most definitely will not re-invent the wheel.
Excel does this with it's built-in data sources. Typically it can connect to any ODBC data source, which includes pretty much any SQL database and most proprietary databases (although in some cases you'll need to buy ODBC drivers. Yuck)

Then, bingo! You've got real, structured, data available in Excel so you can run Pivot Tables, build charts, and filter data to your hearts content. I use it frequently to build read-only data views for people who want to analyse their data in ways they don't know how to do using more native tools.

This microsoft post is for Office 2007, but applies equally in newer versions: http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/excel-help/connect-to-impo...
> When the printer stops working, do you expect an apology?

Actually, the better thing a printer can do is explain to me _why_ it failed so I know how to avoid, work around it, or understand what to do next. I feel the FAQ is tons better than "sorry". My printer already says "sorry, print job failed". Try again, "sorry, print job failed". Then it is me cursing at it "piece of shit! tell me why it failed, I need to get my stuff printed"..."sorry, PC load letter"..."Arghhhh!"

So actually I like Heroku's response more. Technical info for technical users.
"In software development, lack of experience can be a really big issue" can you explain this one to me? I hope that someone who calls themselves a senior developer with 20 years experience will know a lot about different technologies. On the other hand if you are a co-founder who needs to code, design, network and do many many other things, software development has nothing to do with it. Your demo will not be using the right technologies.
Companies grow and new developers get hired. Code gets re-written and technologies you use, will be changed.
I'm always impressed by Larry's talks. Every time I see him talk about Perl 6 it really makes me want to work on and use Perl 6. So, I'm trying not to see Larry talk, anymore.
Stripe FTW