skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fundamental problem with big spreadsheets is that they're complex pieces of software, and they're being designed by people who haven't studied software engineering.

Building a complex program is hard. It's untenable if you don't approach it properly. This is true whether you're using Excel, Python, LISP, or anything else. Better tools can go a long way to help, but the ultimate answer is educating people on how to properly engineer systems.

On that last point - at DataNitro[1], we let people script Excel with Python, which is a better tool than VBA or than doing things by hand. The result is that for a given level of complexity, you see fewer errors and more robust spreadsheets; but when you give people more power, they naturally build more sophisticated spreadsheets. All else being equal, this might result in more, not fewer errors.

The great thing about introducing a new tool, though, is that there's also a chance to introduce new ways of working. Suddenly, people start building spreadsheets that work with version control and run unit tests. This helps tremendously with robustness and reliability.

[1] https://www.datanitro.com
Stasi.? Germans are simply shying away from comparing it to the Nazis' unimaginable wet dream because of a very self-conscious sensitivity about the matter. But don't fool yourselves, ignoring other unrelated, horrible outcomes that were a consequence of the times, this level of surveillance is by far worse than anything that has ever existed in all of human history. It is tantamount to mind reading, and without a doubt on the exact trail to that outcome.
During the WWDC keynote I tweeted this:

"Not sure what's worse about WWDC keynote days: Apple fans cheering for new features or Android/WP fans saying "we have that already"."

It's boring and repetitive and expected. Yeah, they mimic. Big deal. Get over it.
Greece suspends state broadcaster ERT to save money
They could use some explanation of how regular users could use this and its implications, but it seems intriguing. I'm also somewhat impressed with the list of contributors who are involved.
That line isn't by Mark Twain.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:History
From a German perspective, it probably doesn't matter at all whether or not this story is even true or how the messages were retrieved if it is true. The US has earned the mistrust of the world.
They probably have a semi-automatic data collection system where you can type in a name, and it collects all sorts of public data in real time. To a non-technical person, this can look like they have a file on you, when in reality this crawler just compiled all the data in a few minutes.
Maybe Google knows too much, is the real issue?
First off, it really doesn't look good for you to claim your opponent should be required to do the thing you admit you were too lazy to do. That's a tad dishonest on your part.

Your attempt at insults doesn't help your case either.

I also fail to see what was incorrect about his statement about amending the Constitution. There is indeed a way to change the document, the amendment process. I think you need to clarify what you mean by your statement for it to make sense.

By the way, I don't think you understand what well-regulated means in the context of when it was written.
Price Anchoring to Optimize Your Pricing Strategy
I don't see how your question follows from my post.

If you intend to imply that I agree with the NSA that Germany is a US possession, then you're wrong. In the 80's I protested American occupation personally.

However, it's useful to understand the mindset of the people in power in Washington. They really do regard everything as American soil.

Finally, from a logical perspective, the Germans didn't allow US military bases; it was part of the post-war occupation accord. The French and the UK got their sectors, too, as did the Soviet Union.
> Many programmers have flexible work hours they can use. You don't need to be in Silicon valley or have a pile of cash to work in a flexible work environment.

Yes and no.

Many programmers can start work when they want, and end work 8-10 hours after that. One segment.

Only the very well off or upper management are able to truly work flexibly. Show up in the morning for a few hours, take off and go to the gym or home, show up later and work for a few more hours. No problem for the founder of Twitter.
> Obviously it seems much more likely that Jana provided the messages, not Homeland Security.

No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials. In fact, the article draws the inference that the US authorities may have been reading her private Facebook messages for weeks.

I'm a native speaker of German; there really isn't any ambiguity here.
Indeed. The only thing scarier than the US monitoring 95% of internet traffic is the US deciding the best use of its super-secret super-powerful internet surveillance is to keep illegal au pairs out of the country. But I doubt they're actually that foolish.
Hi. I'm a member of the US Militia. You probably are too, if you're a male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45. See the Militia Act of 1792. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Act_of_1792 (Edit: this was reiterated by the Militia Act of 1903)
This. It's important to remember that from the perspective of millions of corporate users (not the hacker crowd), this is is THE tool. When you think about it, Microsoft really is Excel. That is their core. Why is it difficult for corporations to switch from Windows? Office. Why Office? Excel. If anyone attempted to create something that not only matched Excel (with all the messy file compatibility issues and macros), but surpassed it, they would be striking at the heart of Microsoft.
Yeah, that's what a lot of the premier android keyboards do.
The laws the FISA court uses to authorize surveillance are not secret.

Well, so far as we know anyway. There is still, AFAIK, an open question about the existence and/or exact nature of "secret laws" in the US. See John Gilmore's struggle to travel without offering up identity documents[1], for example.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
More Than 50,000 Sign Petition to Pardon Whistleblower Edward Snowden
It is only the top shard of ice on the iceberg. If you only knew how big the iceberg was.
Mark Zuckerberg Addresses Concerns About Stock Price
A declaration of love for linux
The beauty of using Linux in 2013 is that you end up forgetting that it’s free, and most of the people out live in a closed world when it comes to computing.
How so? FS-level sharing is easy to use (it's just a drive that's the same on everyone's machine) and the workflow is a lot more efficient if you're using a conventional application to edit the files. It performs pretty well, and integrates nicely with AD/Kerberos for security. As long as there's a decent versioning/backup policy in place (which can be handled by the server admins, users don't have to worry about it) what's the problem?
Excel is a great tool, but it has its shortcomings. The article is highlighting the main one: it's easy to build huge, brittle systems with Excel.

This immediately brings up questions: What tools exist for building robust spreadsheets? How can we encourage people to use them? Should we make better ones?
I dare say that the problem is less about Excel being dumb than that if you're interested in the underlying logic Excel hides all that from you the minute you click off a cell. There's black box programming and then there's just silliness.

As for data-entry, ideally, that's not something that humans should be doing for anything but the most trivial concern. If you have huge columns of financial data or test results or what have you, then having someone type it into a computer is silliness of the highest order.
Are they allowed to disclose the nondisclosure order?
Yes please! Email in profile. Thanks!
I prefer the transpation of "Würzburg" as "peppering castle" that babelfish did when the web was still young...
For what it's worth, I think the principle of journalists being unbiased dates from the latter half of the 19th century. I may be wrong, but my understanding was that the press was explicitly and formally partisan up until that time. Here's the only support I can find for that after a few minutes searching ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_%28journalism%29#Hi...
When it comes to surveillance the Stasi did a way better job than any NS organisation.
Interesting. Any theories on how they linked that FB profile to her real name? Maybe through the WHOIS record of her website, that got linked from that Facebook page often enough to imply a relationship?
SMB at least avoids the stupid NFS behaviour where any program that tries to read while the server's offline uninterruptibly hangs.
I like it a lot. It would be useful to be able to shrink/hide the "Results" pane so as to be able to view the map almost full-screen; at certain window sizes, the Results pane takes up nearly 50% of the screen.

I will soon be flat-hunting, and I'll definitely give Kangaroom a try.

Edit: it's also nice to see something UK-specific for once :)
Ask HN: No more than 3 articles on a topic on homepage
Is it fair to ask moderators to keep it to say 3 or 4 articles at the most on the home page about a single topic? I feel like when a major event happens HN becomes overwhelmed on a single topic to the detriment of representing a broader array of current topics in technology.
It might be forgotten but I'm sure it will add to the increasingly negative view the rest of the world has of America. It seemed less negative once the Bush administration ended but things like this could restart the negative opinion.
No, there isn't. Protecting secrets cryptographically is an engineering problem. There are right answers and wrong answers, and having Google Mail deliver PGP to you directly is a wrong answer.
Can you not just install modern samba yourself?
Search for 1st Web page takes detour into NC
RubySource | Ruby, Python, Java, C and Programmer HappinessRubySource
Excel already does this to a degree. If a cell has a formula that is inconsistent with its neighbors, it will be flagged. If a formula omits cells adjacent to the range it is working with, it will be flagged.

Check out Options: Formulas: Error checking rules. It's almost as if Microsoft has been continually developing this software for years and years and they have seen many common mistakes. ;)
You should fork the English language.
Isn't this a bigger deal than just monitoring supposedly private Facebook communications? This would also violate attorney-client privilege too, right?

EDIT: This is just naïveté on my part.
Iterator invalidation. If we didn't have that rule you could write this:

let mut vector = ~[ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ];
for vector.each_mut |x| {
// ^ mutable reference
for 5.times {
vector.pop();
// ~~~~~^ mutable reference
}
println((*x).to_str()); // segfault: invalidated iterator
}
There are limits to how many EC2 instances one account can run without getting special permission from Amazon. And even when you do get permission they will only increase the limit so much. More information is available in the AWS faq: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...
what I am curious about in this and similar stories is whether the officials actually carry out due diligence in making sure the profile actually belongs to the person in question. after all, anybody can get an email and spoof a profile.
DHS CIS (immigration authorities) has been using Facebook and other social networks to detect relationship fraud in citizenship applications. EFF foia-ed a memo on the subject: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/social_network/DHS_Custom...
Liberals are mad about citizens united, but Roberts is doing yeoman's work. In hindsight, do you really want the government deciding what is political speech and what is impermissible electioneering? Or that the corporations targeted by the NSA have no speech rights? Then he threaded the needle with obamacare. Upholding it, but reiterating the narrower commerce power of Lopez.
I use one of those tools at work. It's called Google :)
Ask HN: How Do You Market A Hotel Comparison Website?
Any Ideas how you can drive the right traffic to your site without it coming over as spam.

I know the site isn't perfect I am still getting some things sorted. Like the cars and flights and some other shit.

I am saving up money to get the logo re-done.

I used a free £50 google adwords voucher and all google did was put it on pages which weren't relevant. When I questioned it with them, they rang me and said the pages where relevant, which is bullshit.

Here is an example.

Most of my clicks where from http://tvmao.com/

Which was a Chinese site I don't mind the Chinese since it is a growing economy. But there 195 clicks didn't even appear in google analytics. So that wiped £5.80 of my budget.

Here is another example.

gamesandapps.com was 66 clicks which cost me £2.59 of my budget. I don't even know where the site display's it's ads.

So since the display ads wiped out 4/5 of my budget and 90 Percent weren't relevant I think I will stick to search in future which isn't on default so lession learnt, so watch out newbies to the wonderful world of Google AdWords.

Any other sites, which work, to market your site?

My site is www.cutpricedhotels.com
I've been using kippt for a long time. I use it everyday. It's an awesome product.
Your sysadmin is obviously not beating you hard enough.

You break my system, you're in deep shit sunny Jim.
Cat friendly version of our SSL store - CatSSL
It is interesting to conjecture and theorize about the personality of the US intelligence community and just what price they are willing to pay to protect different types of information.

For example: I wonder how much of their secrecy is really about protecting American citizens. After the Boston bombings (and 9/11 for that matter) there seemed to be no secrecy about the bombers. All types of information came out: that Russian intelligence had warned them about these guys, that one of them had already been investigated by the FBI for something else. All the information coming out had this open, non-secret feel. Same for 9/11: we suddenly knew about the movements and actions of the terrorists for months prior to the World Trade acts. How they trained, how they hijacked the planes, how Bin Laden had engineering insight and knew that hitting the towers at a certain height would make them collapse.

PRISM seems murky as shit compared to that. It's almost like it's dealing in a completely different type of information altogether. This is what makes me wonder about what percentage of PRISM-type surveillance is really about locating some band of terrorists training in some desert camp. The secrecy around it seems much more likely to protect the spies than the American people.

I do refuse to believe that the NSA employees are merciless warmongers looking to secretly destabilize nations and install puppet regimes while somehow profiting off of the anarchy that ensues (although a lot of US history is precisely that). I think most of them genuinely believe that they are doing good work that makes the world a safer place. But the personality of the organization they work for doesn't fit the rest of the picture and I just wonder what it is they are told in order to feel that the secrecy is justified.
Right... It's probably more sophisticated like that. Similar to what many HR departments use to screen future employees.
Great opportunity to deepen the relationship with students, serving as more than just a listing board but a guiding partner in answering the ever-daunting question, "What should I do when I grow up?"
They are nevertheless armed among other things with nuclear weapons.
The United States is not going to blow the operational security of a Top Secret program to bust a teenaged nanny. There's more to this poorly-translated story.
HR departments just use Google...
Everybody seems to keep forgetting about Geocities.

They had millions of passionate users who built over 38 million pages on the site. They introduced ads in 1997 and two years later became the 3rd most visited sited on the web.

Yahoo acquired them in 1999 for $3.57 billion.

Yahoo was unable to further monetize those users. There wasn't some magic money tap they could turn on to make money from the site (despite it's popularity). Geocities never made a profit.

What's Geocities worth today?
You do realize that there is more to flat design than just removing gloss? If I were to agree with your statement then I would say the opposite is also true. Draw a rectangle, add some gloss and voila.. Apple's design right?
That's ridiculous. What cat needs a laptop? They can already sleep on yours.
The videos will be recorded and made available to students. If you can't make the classes, you can always watch them after the fact. So long as you keep up with the course work, you should be just fine.
"elements from iOS"

Frequently seen re: MBA and iMac knock offs as well. It's hilarious and worth pointing out in both directions although I think the popular notion that one cancels out the other is false equivalence.
I disagree, I think we can solve this problem without placing a hard limit on the number of articles on the home page. Consider:

1. That to place a limit on the number of articles on a particular topic on the homepage you must be able to group articles into topics.

2. If you can group articles into topics why not implement either: (a). a filter control which filters out topics based on user selection or (b). a second "diversity of topics" page HN which includes only the top articles on HN per topic (a log plot of HN).
Joe Biden is like an amazing "character actor" of politics.

He has an almost Clinton-like ability to remain likable ... but whatever you think Clinton was actually like, he came off as sharper conversationally than Biden.

Still, the ability to remain likable in spite of gaffes seems to be vital in Presidential politics -- look at Bush/Kerry.
I heard the whole thing and it did not get better. It was rather uncomfortable in how the interviewer just basically let him go with whatever statement or rant he wanted to make. Little to no follow-ups, no interjections or disagreements that I recall, nor any real thoughtful questions.

It was as if both were reading lines from a cue card.

EDIT: Also, just remembering, at least once he was allowed to not answer a direct question by rambling on with rhetoric that had little to do with the question. Plus, he tried to pass off the idea that Snowden only saw a small section of the big picture so that he had no idea what the total represented, meaning he couldn't possibly know if it were bad or not, but at the same time it was totally devastating to the country's security that he leaked what he did know.
Not deleted as spam, rather marked as "spam or offensive content", basically flagged inappropriate for facebook.
Started following LookBookHQ. =D

Ever read "Specification By Example? That approach along with some of your suggestions could be used to prove your testable specification spreadsheet concept.

The market awaits for you.
iOS7 icons make my eye soar. Seriously... I wish they spent more time with UI and make whole thing consistent.
Why would the not-an-American-citizen lawyer speaking to a not-an-American-citizen have attorney-client privilege from the perspective of an American governmental organization?

Edited to add: It's remarkably difficult to quickly find information about attorney-client privilege in settings other than US, UK, Canada, and Australia. I found a brief mention that the privilege does not apply to in-house counsel in the EU, and that Brazil breaches it with a court order, but that's all. I'd hope I could find more given some more time, but I need to get back to work.
This is a new style for their designers, and I'm not surprised the visual design still needs some work. This is analogous to a developer learning a new framework - it takes time to learn it and get things right.
level 7 is hiring? :)
Is this a Aprils fools joke? If not this would be unreal.
David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden
also keep in mind that this isn't the Spiegel
It's not totally clear to me that these were private messages.

I know that the Canadian Border services agency will look things up that are posted publicly on the internet to verify stories. My guess is that the messages were public and the immigration staff just looked them up and happened to see them.
These arguments always strike me as coming from people who don't actually understand what design is. The folks who think that design is the font face, the weight of lines, the colors used. Those are all facets of design, but they are essentially just tools to accomplish the goal: experience and engagement. What you are noticing are just trends, and this is nothing new. Look back over the history of even just twentieth century graphic/print design, and you will see how marked trends define periods in time. The fact that one product or group uses the same or similar elements to another does not say that one is the copy of another, simply that they are both products of the same era.

I haven't used iOS 7 yet, so I can't say this with certainty, but based on my experience with Apple, I feel pretty confident to say that they may have integrated similar graphic motifs you're familiar with from other platforms, but the end experience will be leaps and bounds better than others who've tried to implement the same elements. There is real thought put into how a person will best use this product, not just how clean and pretty the UI can look.
Agreed. Although you could replace 'Excel' with 'Word' and still be just as correct.
I actually first saw the new lock screen linked by some random comment poster on one of the tech sites and had to double-check that it wasn't some Android variant and that they weren't having me on. Not joking.
No, according to the article the printouts were provided by the US immigration officials.

I think the point is that the facts provided by the article don't seem very likely.
Two Facebook articles on foreign privacy events in one day? Where were these reports before Snowden hit the news cycle?
You're correct, it wouldn't apply. My naïveté had me a little carried away.
Samsung would like to have a word with you. (motioning the lawsuit that Apple took up against them last year over petty things like rounded corners)
Online eBooks for Agile Designers
While we are pointing fingers... why are the Germans so set on laying the economic foundation for WWIII? We get it, you feel like you shouldn't have to rescue "lazy bums", but get over it already and suck it up. The US massively spent too reconstruct Germany after WWII, partially because of the realization that post-WWI financial destitution was part of the groundwork for WWII.

It's not like your entirely blameless here either Germany, your banks made the questionable decision to lend money to those lazy bums so they could buy back German goods.
I would have to disagree with that one. In my experience the New York Times' definition of "the great, always correct American way" is based solely on whether they like the people in power at the time. The NYT is always quick on the disagreement if it's about a group of people they don't like. If the same actions are performed by the agreeable group then all's well.
I don't disagree that there's this additional angle but I think that it would be better served with a separate video.
Die Linke probably disagrees.
So? America is horrible. Especially how they won't let us in.
Do you recall any specific story where they ask you to unlock it?
How Spy Agency Contractors Have Already Abused Their Power
Facebook urges U.S. government to allow disclosure of security requests
Safari itself does not magically eat your CPU but websites running badly written javascript do. (Not to mention the infamous plugin thingy from Adobe, which any sane person will disable anyway.)

So, the CPU usage of Safari totally depends on what websites you happen to have open.