skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would Excel's formula language look like if you invented it today?
If you were to invent a language to be used in spreadsheets today, what would it look like?

Would you just jump on the JavaScript bandwagon?

Google Docs clones the Excel formula language for use in cells but allows you to write
extensions/macros (where you would use VBA) in Google Apps Script but what is it
really? It looks a lot like JavaScript. The documentation totally
sucks, it lives in the Google Apps Script IDE, the debugging is
terrible. It can't easily be shared or put on github and it's hard to test.

Why not have a single language for the cells and for extensions? I'm thinking real JavaScript would be interesting, as in is being able to import
external scripts and exporting their globals into the spreadsheet's namespace then being able to
set a cell to apply the function and display the output of that
function.

So you could set the value of a cell to `=function(i){Math.pow(i,2)}(A2)` this would
apply JavaScript's `Math.pow(_,2)` to the value of the cell `A2` or you could let imported functions work directly on the spreadsheet cells and do something like `=Math.pow(A2,2)`

This doesn't solve the problem of JavaScript being a terrible programming language and after re-reading the above,
is asking users to write a closure around multiple-argument functions crazy, is polluting the spreadsheet namespace with external functions too crazy? What if a third party JavaScript lib has a function called A2, or even SUM which conflicted with the builtins Perhaps a
stack-based programming language would be more appropriate,
especially when you start trying to do operations on ranges (lists).

The first thing that comes to mind is Forth but a more modern
alternative that plays well with JavaScript is Daimio http://daimio.org/.
yes, it can.
It ugly, because you're doing type level programming, but is possible
http://apocalisp.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/type-level-program...
Three conditions would make life extension practical for me.

1) Cost of living becomes negligible or earning a living is still possible at 100+.
2) The additional years are healthy ones.
3) Breeding is reduced or resource availability is increased.

But even then, I think Asimov's premise that a longer-lived person doesn't have the urgency of a shorter-lived person has merit (The Naked Sun.)

If you have hundreds of years to live, why do something risky (or even expressive) RIGHT NOW?
I'm not sure I'd remove any, but there is a huge incoherence in what is and is not "idiomatic" scala.

The most obvious example that comes to mind is whether you should use mix in traits or type classes for api design. Another one is the "magic-ness" of map/flatmap/filter for for comprehensions but no way to extend that for Functor/Monad/Monoid type classes.

Finally, the Scala community is a huge advocate of Algebraic Data Types yet don't support Disjoint types making any sufficiently complex system cumbersome to model as an ADT.
I think the answer is "neither," exactly like the gambler on a hot streak is neither good at roulette or due for a loss.
Techies vs. NSA: Encryption arms race escalates
Yes, FireWire is bad in this regard, because it normally allows devices direct DMA to other devices memory space. This is also what makes/made it so popular for high-bandwidth/low-latency applications.

But keep in mind that this is something that a host actually has to turn on for every single device on the bus[1], but probably most drivers are lazy and just unconditionally enable this globally.

[1] See PhysicalRequestFilter in the OHCI specs
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/1/161ba512-40e2-4...
Up-voters, you hooked me up. Nice job.
Not viewable on iOS I presume
There are no democracies, only oligarchies.
It is often instructive and useful to look at the behavior of real implementations, not just the idealized behavior given by the standard.
The OP's advice, while phrased in terms of "trading stocks", is relevant to trading any individual financial assets. Not sure why some people have fixated on this as stock-qua-equity-only advice. The same advice applies to trading bonds, forex, options, etc. From a trading perspective, bitcoin is just a ridiculously volatile forex currency.
I'm a student in the Stanford machine learning class at the moment and wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all the contribution that the community TAs have put in to help us out!
It's funny, I have also asked that to a lot of people, but I immediately tell them that they will stay young and healthy (but experiences and knowledge will continue accumulating) and that there are enough available pills for anyone wanting them.

99.9% say they wouldn't take it. The usual reason is "I'd get bored".

Then I ask them if the think the majority of other people would get the pill. 99.9% think that other people would take the pill.

I suppose that people really hate their lives, don't dare say that not even to themselves, and they think other people have a much better life.
I remember the BMG Sony rootkit scandal vividly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...)

Most of all I remember that the only company not willing to sit tight was FSecure. They contacted BMG Sony and where about to go public, when Mark Russinovich publicized this atrocity. At least that's how I recall it.

It's since then that I have zero faith in security software vendors.
TL;DR version: the idea is that "content you might like" should recommend not only the relevant information of your views, but also the helpful information of opposite views from highly ranked authors. This will milden the polarisation of views and make everyone more informed of the issue.
Why would anybody care about fans? They are by definition not rational, I'll quote wikipedia "[a fan] is a person who is enthusiastically devoted to something, such as a band, a sports team or entertainer".

So if you write about bitcoin focus on something worthwhile.

I do have coins. I'm not a fan.
It's more like $90m and it was the operator of the site (http://www.reddit.com/r/SheepMarketplace/comments/1ru5ir/fou... and other threads in that subreddit)
Article One of the United States Constitution guarantees the writ of habeas corpus. If their conviction was based on the "strengthened" evidence, I believe not releasing them would be unlawful detention and be unconstitutional.

I am not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
There are always more pressing problems. There are always more pressing problems than, say, engaging in space flight, or do a lot of research.

In fact, there is a whole class of problems that cannot be meaningfully tackled by addressing them directly. I imagine a physician in the dark ages "treating" people suffering from acute pestilence would say there are more pressing concerns than research into invisible microbes. An aid worker in Africa fighting disease and poverty would say there are more pressing things than life extension and nanotechnology.

And then, unexpectedly to a lot of people, whole classes of problems just disappear because of the consequences of a newly discovered technology. Right now, fighting poverty with advanced 3D printers seems like lunacy or heresy, because our society is based on scarcity. Eliminating unwanted death and disease looks like a maniacal pipe dream that frightens a lot of people, because our civilization is based on death and superstition.

From a psychological perspective it's interesting that heroically fighting a losing battle against certain consequences of our deficiencies is considered good and honorable, while eliminating the root causes is strictly taboo.

As an aside, I liked Miracle Day (but not as much as The Children of Earth, by a long shot), but it portrays a very gruesome and technically implausible form of "immortality". It's clear why they chose to do it like this, because the whole plot hinged pretty much on the monstrosity of that effect. That's however not what it would look like if/when we become adept at life extension.
I don't think this is about it being "impossible" to die. Without additional assumptions, you still need to provide for food, health and shelter.

Even if death was an impossibility, you still need things that make time enjoyable, and with the entire planet competing for limited resources, money/price would still be the way to segregate access.
Is it mandatory for U.S. citizens to all have a basic level of education? I wonder because we learned in economics class long time ago about how Asian countries were basically requiring everyone to have a basic level of education to help drive growth in the country.
Instead of randomness, rank should be used as probability of getting selected on the first page. Not sure how to do it, and how to maintain the cache.
> "... by dropping them on my porch and hoping my neighbors are honest."

You wouldn't even need to do this. If you have a garden (even a communal one) then the drone could simply land there instead. Or perhaps a balcony, if large enough. I can imagine Amazon sending you a beacon of some kind which the drone could communicate with when nearby to pinpoint where it's supposed to land.
Loud jumbo mosquitoes constantly buzzing around my neighborhood, ruining my view and endangering my kids? I want 30 minute delivery, but not that badly. I can plan ahead and exercise patience, or use a bike messenger.
Visualizing Crime Rates for Every Block of San Francisco (updated)
This isn't newsworthy, and we've already seen 800ish in the last 24 hours.
Interruption science
Long on Cutting Edge of Print, New York Magazine Cuts Back
What does it take to enjoy your first ice cream in mars? ..While it floats away, and you jump 25m vertically, to grab it with your lips? :-)
or
myVar.map({ val => doSomething(val) }).getOrElse(handleNone())
I've heard that mutual fund companies do this. After a few years, underperforming funds get closed and good performers diversify their holdings until they perform like index funds -- The few years of luck at the beginning are enough to show higher overall returns.
I will do this for my business ( www.f3.to ) before the year is out, commercially. Please mark this post and call bullshit on me if I don't.
Here is a very good interview with economist William Sharpe (Nobel prize winner, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Forsyth_Sharpe) that also explains why cheap index funds are better for most investors. The whole interview is very interesting (and long) but for the investing theory on why this true, you can just skip to around 30:00 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGIzygsvqck

*Edited to include Wikipedia article of Sharpe for those that don't know who he is.
There are plenty of reasons to work for a company that you don't personally think will be successful:

1. You believe in their mission (e.g working for a newspaper even though that industry is in real trouble)
2. You have constraints around when and where you can work - limited to a certain town, need part-time work
3. They offer a high salary for your specific skills - sure, they might be out of business in a few years but you can make good money for the moment
oVirt 3.3.1 was released
Los Angeles does not have below-average commute times; it has above-average commute times (the mean is just a hair under 30 minutes).

The NYC subway system is also a red herring. The subway primarily serves Manhattan, The Bronx, and Brooklyn. Of those people who commute into Manhattan from another borough, a plurality come from Queens, half of which has no subway coverage at all; that's for people inside NYC proper and obviously excludes NJ, Westchester, and Long Island commuters.
Creating a single image file with all your images in it and referencing them in this way lets you use a single HTTP request to load all your images. It's a way of optimizing sites. This is a tool to make generating the CSS needed for this pattern easier.
Those drones aren't fully-autonomous they are flying in an intelligent room with cameras and special lights attached to the walls. The control computers are also not on-board.
I feel you. I tried Scala out and after several days I just uninstalled everything from my computer which was related to Scala. The main reason is that it feels like some extremely baroque java without any sensible syntax. It looks like the C sytax but in fact it is not. Return types are sometimes explicit sometimes implicit. If you try to learn Scala you have to forget anything you know and learn the over-engineered ways of Scala. And in the end you don't get anything back which is not accessible in other languaes in a significantly easier way. You want functional style and easy concurrency? Go clojure. You want scalability for your webapp with 999999999 visitors per day? Go node. You want scientific calculations with good library support? Go python. You want a sensible type system and monads? Go Haskell. Scala just does not have much to offer in exchange for the terrible pile of contraptions it forces you to use.
I like your idea! In an evidence based society, it might be picked up and spread like wildfire.

Of us (by majority, here) programming nerds, who wouldn't want to write better programs? Which consumer doesn't want better product safety? Which government could fail to want more truth-based justice?

But the USA is far from an evidence based society. It's a society where, in the interest of perpetuating religions, intellect is trumped by superstition and evidence by authority. As a side effect, justice is predicated on vengeance rather than reform.
Using https://duckduckgo.com as a first step: http://dontbubble.us/
No, it doesn't. But say it did. What now? What's your point? The quote also doesn't make note of the struggles of the Australian Aboriginal peoples; why not take issue with that too? Where are you going with this?
I think it would be cheaper and easier to have only a couple warehouses in space/orbit.
Why do you have the 18-25 age requirement then?
I wonder what he would have had to say at the time about this: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/missile-mai...
I would say, that surely flags of an article to count (how much, I really am not sure). At least I would do that.

And I believe, that comments would also count a fair amount. An up-vote is a strong signal, but a comment is an even stronger signal.

I would (without telling anybody) even take the length of comments into account when weighting. I would at least try this and do an A/B-test, to see if this heightens the quality of articles on the front-page.

I would also use clicks on the link as an indicator, but one would have to be careful, as this would push link-bait articles to the top. So here one should not put too much weight into clicks.
I've seen this argument before in other scenarios (open education, etc.). It is technically correct but pointless. Just about anything we do to raise living standards in society increases the gap between rich and poor.

Does that mean we need to stop trying to raise the living standards of the majority of people and stop trying to offer things like free food, free healthcare, and free education? No.

It's like if someone argued against the use of penicillin because it increased the lifespan disparity between rich and poor. I'm sure it did and still does (for those with no access to pencillin), but what is the point? Are we supposed to stop using penicillin then to keep lifespans closer together? Or should we instead focus on getting more people access to penicillin, similar in a (very rough) sense to how the "learning to code" movement is focusing on making computational literacy more accessible to everyone.
There is a dramatic performance difference in "Newton's Revenge" between Chromium and Firefox (Linux). I wonder why.
What empirical data disagrees with the EMH? I also have no idea why you believe the EMH requires investors to agree on the prospects of various instruments. It doesn't. If it did, the EMH would be a "no one ever trades" theorem.

If the EMH were false, a trading strategy generating above-market (risk-adjusted) returns over the long haul would exist. Claiming such a strategy exists is far more plausible if you've already traded it and won.
How to Generate Beautiful Apple-Style Documentation in Xcode 5
Wow, a personal attack for a phrase you don't like, implicitly expressing joy over the prospect of a commenter's death - and you still got upvoted for it. Amazing what people get away with here lately.
I'm not sure that knowing how to code is even that useful for most people.

In the actual world we live in I agree with you.

However, in a thoughtful world, we would get everyone started coding at 5 and have many many classes devoted to it from K-12 ... because computers really are incredible force multipliers. If you know how to code, you can be much better at whatever you do.

But back to the real world, it's going to be much more like your trigonometry ... where kids fight it and forget it when they graduate HS.

I feel like saying everyone should learn to code is in the same spirit as saying everyone should get a stronger math education and everyone should learn statistics. Sure, everyone should get a better math education and learn statistics ... but that's easier said than done.
I bought AAPL at that price in May of 2005. I held on to it during the crash, buying more in 2008 (when it had gone down a fair amount). And you're right... my total gain (including purchases at the higher price) is 430%. My total for that initial purchase is higher :)
Yeah, you trade power for easier testing and unforseen side-effects for determinism. IMO it's worth it.
Cdist 2.3.7 cleans up various types
As someone looking into learning a different JVM language, and who has started reading Scala in Action, I find this article and thread very useful.
I am certain any panel you could possibly add would cost more energy to lift than it might collect.
The trees actually look a little d3js-like http://prcweb.co.uk/lab/d3-tree/?utm_content=buffer14589&utm... :)
When working locally you can do something similar with -U<n> and I've also found using --patience can sometimes generate cleaner patches.
NSA doesn't need to ask anti-virus companies to ignore certain malware, as long as Microsoft is handing them lists of fresh Windows vulnerabilities months before they even begin working on fixing them.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-t...

Until that policy changes at Microsoft, at least 90 percent of the PC users will never be truly safe.
In theory you wouldn't be able to get a High school diploma without being literate. Without that your options for jobs are pretty much zero.
The article is absolute drivel - almost. The last paragraph saves it.

"Technologies should adapt to our needs and values." Period.

Off to research how education dealt with the horseless carriage and the flying machine back in the old 20th cent.
From ‘Preggers’ to ‘Pizzle’: Android’s Bizarre List of Banned Words
Perhaps it was police at the time deciding to take a less aggressive stance? This was ~15 years ago.
> Aren't we supposed to be the champions of the future?

If you mean as "hackers", to pick a word from the name of this website, who were for a long time, rightly or wrongly, supposed to be conscientious watchdogs of present and future technology, no.

If for no other reason, as technologists who witnessed Stallman, Assange, Bradley, Snowden, so on in their lifetimes, you're supposed to be first and foremost astute critics of the future that dominant forces of the realm of technology such as Amazon are aiming to build. And rather than enthusiastically applaud whatever new and possibly exciting technology they bring to the table that contributes to your present or future paycheck and their private profit, you're supposed to take political responsibility for the future you help build by being their employees, customers and unpaid evangelists.
but to take one specific example - mortgage cdos in the last decade - what about that market was efficient?

The existence of apparent bubbles does not contradict the EMH. Scott Sumner has a great post explaining this: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=25011

If you believe the boom&bust cycle shows the market to be irrational, what is the EMH-disproving trading strategy? "The market did something I don't like" is not the same thing as "the EMH is false."
I think Vonnegut wrote a short story about this. Oh yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
I'm not objecting to people owning stocks for the dividends - buying part of a debt and getting the return on it isn't a bad way to fund stuff, and it is a good way to keep your savings scaled to the economy when savings interest is puny (as now). As the author of this post suggests, the way to do this is to buy into an index-averaged fund.

I do think far too much is made of price fluctuation profit, which is essentially a casino game, rigged to those with better information (i.e. not you) and completely unproductive to boot. I don't see why it should be an industry, nor why trades should count towards GDP.
How shareable are your testimonials?
no offense, man, it is just sound like you've never developed or deployed Enterprise Identity and Access Management.

Actually, Enterprise systems are my bread and butter. My current company's product is a base framework and code generation system for producing Enterprise-class systems, and among the many features we include is identity and access management. It uses a few tables, as I described. We also integrate with IBMi authentication and Microsoft Active Directory, neither of which are logically more complex than I've described. At my previous employer we designed and built an authentication system that was a lot more complex, with federated authentication managed by dozens of systems that were outside of our control. That took a lot longer to design and build (most of a year for a two-person team) but once deployed it could process a login in a couple of seconds at most, even with the authentication system halfway around the world from the web application's server. And, it could scale to many more federated systems than a few dozen; that's just the number of countries that were using it.
RPN can also be viewed as a serialization mechanism for expression trees, and with the addition of a 'dup' operator, directed acyclic graphs (aka DAGs). The notation is used by both the JVM (with typed operators) and the CLR (with operators whose type is inferred from the operands on the stack). Evaluating the stack symbolically results in rehydrating the source tree.
I bet that if you had asked AT&T and the like - before they got caught - if they gave the NSA warrant-less access to U.S. citizens' communications, they would have also said "no."
A weekly Drupal News Roundup. Let's Drup Up The Week. Issue 9
Actually, the recent articles on HN's ranking algorithm suggest that PG considers comments to be evidence against an article being a quality article. Presumably that's why he penalizes articles with lots of comments.
I call it "going through the motions of science" in order to be able to claim scientific objectivity.

There certainly is a science of forensics, but I think that what happens in a crime lab relates to that science like plumbing relates to hydrodynamics: it's technology, not science.

Done right, this technology leads to results that are generally more reliable than eyewitnesses and other forms of circumstantial evidence. But it's a mistake to consider a technology infallible just because it's based on science. The Scientific Method cannot rule out accident, human error, and malice.
My instincts are that it's in stack memory, not heap, so there won't necessarily be a violation, and as you're not overwriting with anything (or making a new stack frame), sure the memory's still there and unaltered.

You can write all over your stack if you like. It's a pretty bad idea though.
Being a Mass. Resident this is really really really really old news! How the hell is this just not getting here?