skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the subheading is:

> Dodging taxes and regulation isn't just disruptive – it's bad for the economy

Baker then writes:

> Most cities and states both tax and regulate hotels, and the tourists who stay in hotels are usually an important source of tax revenue

Less government revenue is not inherently good or bad for the economy.

> their neighbors in condo, co-ops or apartment buildings may think they have the right not to be living next door to a hotel

Which is also why all the mentioned typically have rules residents must abide by, which may or may not forbid paid visitors. I also don't see how that is bad for the economy.

> Others in the economy will lose by bearing an additional tax burden

One party "dodging" taxes does not automatically raise those on others.

> ...if Uber and related services (like Lyft) flood the market, they could harm all drivers' ability to earn even minimum wage.

Again, not bad for the economy. If Uber and Lyft depress wages for drivers substantially, it suggests that the existing regulatory scheme is inefficient. Now, mind you, depressed wages for drivers may in fact be socially undesirable, but that is a separate question from whether it is economically harmful.
That was the one :)
I received an unauthorized password reset attempt over the weekend. Seems like I probably wasn't the only one.
The beauty of Excel is its ability to do many things 'well enough' in a way that is accessible to a lot of people.

My dad put together his architectural plans for a new house in Excel because it is a tool with which he felt comfortable. Some people do calendars in Excel while others try and recreate a full General Ledger system. Because it works well enough, people don't see the need to invest the time in learning a new application and instead invest their time in pushing the limits of the tool.

As someone who builds financial models and who audits those built by others (and is a competent programmer by night), I think that the key source of risk in Excel models is that the tool has no knowledge of intentions. What I mean by this is that if I'm building a cash flow model or if I'm doing a pixel drawing, Excel doesn't care; as users, we are forced to create our own structure and build in our own checks and balances. If I make a balance sheet in Excel that doesn't balance, Clippy won't show up and let me know that things are broken.

I've often thought that it would be really amazing if a semantic layer could be built that uses Excel as the calculation backend. This sort of tool could understand the sorts of concepts of financial statements, projections, time-series and other concepts that often show up in financial models. It would have a built-in understanding of the domain-specific models that would let it leverage that understanding to reduce risk in the building of financial models. If I told it that I wanted to add a revenue stream that is tied to the output of production, the tool would connect the dots between the production schedule, any inflation and/or foreign exchange assumptions and would feed changes in working capital according to the associated collection terms, etc...

Before I get too carried away, the point is that this type of semantic layer would be much better at preventing and detecting anomalies and potential errors in the development of a high-risk financial model. Does anyone have experience with any such tools?
Why? The NSA already know everything I'm doing, using a fake name and logging out isn't going to do much to stop that.
Discussion of part one can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7777149
So does Python.

Import and export. I get a lot of love from exporting to Excel from people who use what I make. I assume this feature makes it seem that they are doing a lot of work when they can quickly produce large spreadsheets for the boss. The boss? He usually doesn't know nor care. He knows he approved a check for some computer stuff some months ago.....
I was writing something almost identical to this recently, for the general public but also for my co-workers who don't seem to understand the internals of Git at all. I'm sick of being "the Git guy" so this should help a lot.
This pushes home the idea that to have food you essentially need energy. If electricity were abundant enough it could even make sense to grow vegetables close to people in cities, perhaps in the same buildings.
You ignore the whole part about joining the system. Grand has only been homeless for three years, so I'm sure he vividly remembers the struggle of maintaining a "normal" life—the daily struggle of making enough to pay for food and housing. It's not easy. In a city like New York, it's even harder. These are the chains that bind the non-homeless. We're basically running on a mouse wheel till we die.
This is a pretty old function of Google (that predates Google+ by several years). I'm surprised this is news.
Total searches: 60382
>"My problem is that Excel is terrible"

Do you know a better alternative? I have used LibreOffice and Numbers and I will take Excel any day. Saying that it is terrible is a very strong statement for a piece of software that arguably is what keep a lot of people in the Windows world.
Ask HN: Please review my start up – washboxapp.com
Hi everyone,

This is the first time I've submitted anything here but I read HN almost daily. My partner and I have just launched a laundry and dry cleaning delivery service where users schedule orders through our web app or mobile app (mobile app coming soon) and we'd really love your feedback.

https://www.washboxapp.com/

We launched the site 2 weeks ago and have had some great feedback from a few early adopters. We really want to iron out any problems (no pun intended) before we launch on iOS and android. So We're particularly looking for feedback about our whole proposition and if there is anything we could change or add to make it more desirable.

We're based in Bristol, UK so if you want to sign up please use the address 35 St. John's Road, Bristol, BS8 2HD. Any feedback at all would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
James
So I always tell my clients to not create new Google accounts just for their site analytics, because Google tracks all kinds of shit in there.

But they don't get it. So when they inevitably give me that account, I go and delete and disable the search history.

But let me tell you. To disable the search history I first need to open that page, and I've seen a bunch of searches I honestly wish I wouldn't have.
It's a version control system that doesn't include backup functions? It's like a RAID-5 where you have to tell it to rebuild a new disk.
> > Judges would look at that and think "wait no, that breaks everything"

> Is that not how new precedent is set?

That's kinda my point. I doubt judges want to set a precent that all books are now "compilations".
Google released new tooling, # no longer required, scrapes JavaScript pages
I've heard of it, but there has never been an official release. I was looking forward to it for a couple years but I've given up.
"good spreadsheet"

I think the biggest problem is the small crossection of these two terms.
This is a great article to elucidate the complexities of homelessness.

Despite having intelligence and a talent, resulting in an income sufficient to 'get started' on the social ladder and rejoin mainstream society, the prospect is very daunting to Leo.

Even when given access to support and then a 'deadline' to push him (and being accompanied to a bank to deposit the money), it gets too much and he backs out.

Homeless people are not just hopeless drunks or weirdos. They often have an array of complex and intractible fears and issues and are incapable of functioning in mainstream society - even with large amounts of help.

I don't see any blame here - but it does sadden me that someone with so much clear and semi-realized potential can struggle so much. Consider for a moment how homless people less 'fortunate' [I can't help feeling that's the wrong word] must struggle every single day.

I've never thought through the 'teach a man to fish' in this way; life's not actually that simple.

Sadly, I don't see a solution. But I wish there was one.
What I don't understand yet, is what hardware on this band makes it different from other wristbands (besides form factor)? If all the calculations are done on the mobile app, and the wristband is just a data collector, why not implement this app to integrate with existing bands?

We've seen so many wristbands (and now watches) releasing, it doesn't make sense to have separate bands for separate tasks. We'll eventually have a similar problem where every website has it's own app.
BBC.com has advertisements, and is targeted at an international (non-UK) audience. Since the BBC is forbidden from showing ads to UK residents, they have to block you (or redirect you) from any .com pages you hit.
Flappy Bird with touch input outside the iPhone, developed using Fuffr [video]
Does turning it off just mean YOU wonn't me able see the recorded history? :-)
Well, if you're going to be that paranoid, there's no guarantee that they're not still recording / saving all your searches after you disable saved searches.

The point I'm trying to make is either you trust Google to abide by your wishes and not save your search history, or you don't.
deadline for entering is already past :-(
Thanks for posting this guide. I hope to read it soon. Some thoughts on your response:

1) Sometimes the GUI illuminates and the console obfuscates. Logs and history are a lot easier for developers to understand in my experience from a GUI.

2) I'd suggest only using the included GIT GUI that comes with the download from git-scm.com. It is simple enough that it should map easily to another GUI, plus if they aren't using an embedded git everyone should already have it installed.
You're probably not a target and Google is not the NSA. I don't think capitulating and voluntarily giving them your data helps.
What are you just saying? I used both of those statements in the same paragraph to express my sentiment.

And some anecdote about some movie-goer being upset in front of his date? Are you accusing me of fanboyism for saying one solution didn't solve my team's problem, while the other does?
And your location history - if you use Google Now, this is probably enabled.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0
75105 and also not creeped out. Search results are a whole lot more relevant for me when I'm logged in, especially when searching for dev-related topics that oftentimes have very generic, real-world terms with specific meanings in that context.
Uh, it's Comic Chat for the 2010s.

(Ok, bit more extensible and whatnot but c'mon!)
Handy. Thanks!
Why exactly does that surprise you? It's the default behaviour and affords maximal convenience.
Try this
http://pcottle.github.io/learnGitBranching/?NODEMO

It's command line, but it's interactive and visual.

Start off by typing the command `levels` into the prompt at the bottom left.
What backup? You mean we have to manually back up this system?

I am aghast at hearing you say this. Yes, of course you have to run backups. Like with everything else important on your systems.

Why should we have to spend money (aka devops man-hours) developing a backup system, when other Source Version Control systems don't let individual coders blow away the Source?

You don't have to spend 'hours' backing up a git repository. We typically use a bare git repo for the central point that is pushed to / pulled from by the individual developers. It is just a bunch of files, and so can be backed up easily.

You really don't sound like you know what you are doing.

I suggest you hire an experience system administrator (not just another devops) that understands the importance of backups.
I used to work for Deutsche Bank. All financially modeling ran through Excel, though admittedly a massive C++ library that is a big Excel macro plugin. These sheets get massive and there are a few clusters of blades that do nothing but run Excel macros day and night.

But why is this madness? It works for them. The iBanking world is the madness. You can put in place effective change controls and auditing with any system. However, if people just want it done and don't care how, regardless of whether these calculations were in Python, Mathematica or Fortran, garbage in will still be garbage out. So, let's not wantonly scapegoat Excel for a process problem here.
$1 maybe, but not £1. ¥100 is worth £0.58 - quite a big difference.
Solar roadway project
If anything, it'll improve your searches. I always disable search history, on all my accounts.
How often do you find yourself using G+, and needing to log in?
Everyone else only has a full copy of the repository if they actually check out a copy and keep it local. That's apparently not how my coders do their workflow.
The author's comments don't really suggest a "failure", IMO, but rather, a product that is still undergoing testing and development -- which describes Glass.
With shimmable APIs?
I have 21705 and for some reason my history starts from Mar 10, 2013 (I was sure I've had history on for years longer than that), except for some photo searches in 2011 when I was testing an android app.

At any rate, I wish they did more visualizations, and allowed you to see more than the top 5 results for the ones they have.
The Decent Web
Not if you take your entry to the museum on the day.
I understand your gripe (though I don't agree with it; TFS comes out of the box with permissions that only allow administrators to force push in a way that rewrites history, but more importantly, this data was never lost, you would only need to look in the reference log to find this), but surely you're not seriously suggesting that one not backup their TFS server? Please do back that up, even if you're using TFVC moving forward!
R.I.P Massimo Vignelli 
Massimo Vignelli January 10, 1931 - May 27, 2014
Am I the only one who finds this to be useful?

Having a searchable search history feels kinda meta, but this basically solves the problem of "I know I found this webpage a while back but I can't find it again". Ideally this sort of thing would be handled by the browser's history feature and stored locally, but the browser can't (or at least doesn't) correlate between "you searched for this term" and "you clicked this result". I also find that the browser's history search leaves something to be desired, and let's not increase Firefox's memory footprint even more by making it better!

(Browser history is also stored online for most browsers these days, and especially if you use Chrome then Google already have your history anyway).
Thanks for the shim, I was looking for that - very useful and passes all my tests in IE10.
(Since the blog's website is not responding, I had to read the article from google's cache[1])

The author has well-intentioned advice about avoiding MS Excel but it's misguided. The criticism fails to accommodate the reason why MS Excel was used. MS Excel is the lingua franca of non-programmers. Thomas Piketty is a trained economist, not a programmer. It's not realistic to expect Mr. Piketty to set aside months (years) of his time to master C++/Python/Scala/Fortran/etc to avoid using Excel. It's more realistic for an economist to use MS Excel to back his thesis than for a Python programmer to write a bestselling book about economics.

If we then tweak the advice to be, "if Piketty is not a programmer, he should have hired a compsci graduate student as a programmer", well... you've only shifted the (human source of) errors somewhere else. Plenty of examples where software not written in Excel had fatal errors: Therac-25[2], Mars Climate Orbiter[3]

Lastly, some of Piketty's errors were transcription errors. In other words, GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out). Therefore, using Python while there were GIGO issues isn't going to solve the data problem.

[1]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1r99Ioj...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_f...
Harvard/MIT cancer researchers bypass NIH get funding through Bitcoin
This is my first article, it's about something that has bothered me in the last few months: Transitions. It's easy to add them and as easy to forget to remove them where they are not needed.

Feel free to comment on it or call BS. I'm here to learn. :)
Sourcetree has been my favorite, followed by the default GUI installed from the git-scm.com. I've not been a fan of the VS extension because of performance (a want NCrunch and Resharper to have all my free cycles).
Man to 3D Print His Own Home in His Own Home
70$ for a LIFETIME vps with 2gb ram and 40gb ssd
Got my first VPS with CaC in December 2013. No problems reported for me.
Prey tell what is this maximal convenience you are referring to.
Why MS never developed a truly powerful unix compatible terminal is beyond me (not cygwin). Developer buy-in and kudos alone should be incentive alone.

The feeling of being restricted on windows as a developer always gets me running back to linux sharpish.
Rap Genius Cofounder Fired
Naturally, you can only remove 26 items at a time. Makes perfect sense.
71060 since November 21st 2007. (2379 days). Admittedly, I wasn't the only one who was likely getting logged as a searcher for a number of those years. 30 searches per day. That's a lot of searches per day.
I know we're meant to be freaked out by this but I think it would actually be pretty cool to have data for tens of thousands of search results stretching back a decade or so. With a bit of analysis you could get some cool insights into past interests, their dynamics over time etc.
Like dansparza mentioned, this isn't new. If you want to avoid having your searches logged specifically on your google account you could always use an incognito/private session. (Yes, it doesn't stop you from being tracked entirely, but it does limit the effect.)

Also, DDG has severely decreased my search activity.
I stumbled across Pyspread the other day, a more recent attempt at a spreadsheet using Python at the cell-level. See http://manns.github.io/pyspread/.

Pyspread expects Python expressions in its grid cells, which makes a spreadsheet
specific language obsolete. Each cell returns a Python object that can be accessed
from other cells. These objects can represent anything including lists or matrices.

I haven't used it yet, most of my personal spreadsheets are in Google Sheets and I'm not too keen to pull them out of Google Drive.
> (Browser history is also stored online for most browsers these days, and especially if you use Chrome then Google already have your history anyway).

Chrome Sync supports optional client-side encryption, and Firefox Sync always uses client-side encryption.
Same; though it looks like it might be because my account is a Google Apps account.
I don't think we can design this in HN comments... all I'm saying is that it should have been a Day 1 requirement that it is low-level enough to work with any modern widely-used programming language, on a first-class basis.

That's what the comment I quoted is saying, Microsoft likes to do big up-front designs that restrict their platform to uses that they have already thought about.
I think you're right. I just believe Python 3 to supersede Python 2 is going to be hard and companies will have to support both language bases.
I turned this off years ago when it first came out. I have no idea if turning this off is a false sense of privacy or not.

Either way, I turned it back on recently. There are a few things Google requires this feature on such as keeping a history on the Google Maps app for Android.
Every 3rd-party approach is trying to replicate Excel's featureset and maintain compatibility of excel. That means any of Excel's idiosyncracies must be copied as well.

A re-think of the spreadsheet to be a little closer to a SQL database (but still layman-friendly) would be far more sensible. I wish something like Lotus Improv had won.
Argh! I knew about the search history and had it turned off but I did not know about this location database. I recently got an Android phone and it must save your location history because it is showing all my travel for the period I've been using the phone. This is creepy as hell. This phone is going back.
Just a thought - do you need a permanent residence to have a bank account?
Check your Google Account OAuth Authorizations
If you don't want to give them your data, you mustn't use Google. Logging out is nothing more than a placebo.
Late 90s?

Wikipedia: Amazon launched S3, its first publicly available web service, in the United States in March 2006[2] and in Europe in November 2007.[3]
via https://www.facebook.com/luca.vignelli.9
Patrick deserves a lot of credit for taking this problem on. Say whatever about naivete, but he at least fucking did something.

Most HN posters in the U.S. probably haven't experienced true financial stress. It's toxic. It makes you paranoid. Benzos don't help (and they're a terrible long-term solution anyway). You have a constant cold because your immune system is shot. And you never get used to it. It never gets better. The cognitive load is both intense and purely negative. There is no good in it. People who romanticize "poverty" are usually talking about something like grad student life (little money, little expense). Financial stress is as poisonous as ingesting paint thinner, and even a few weeks of it can permanently fuck someone up.

I think that most homeless people have severe mental illness that is not their fault (and that deserves compassion and treatment, not stigma or abuse). If they didn't have it beforehand, they'll have it after a few months of that life.

I think it's damn heroic that Leo was able to summon the cognitive clarity, after that kind of long-term damage, to build something. Unfortunately, that's not going to be enough to get him anywhere near the level of mental health that would enable him to hold down a typical white-collar job. That's a fucking long road.
No thanks. This is what it looks like if you have web history turned off.

http://imgur.com/wgF7Q5J

I've had web history turned off for a while now.
Sure, please post the link to the paper, it sounds interesting.
Using your tech skills to pivot into a new job
1. Some of this does look like ignorance on the part of my coworker who set up both. But why isn't that a default setting? Why give that permission to all users?

2. This is true only if other users keep local copies of the main repository, keep it updated, and don't mix it in with their code. You're making a lot of assumptions.
Powershell was an internal grass roots product, I think. I read it somewhere so may or may not be true.
Not having to log in again every day.
It's actually just using the browsers scrolling mechanism. Android 4+, iOS 5+ ship with touch-scrolling that you can enable on an element so it's as close to native scrolling as you can get.

Just add this CSS:

overflow: scroll;
-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
Spotify is a paid service, and they store user-sensitive data. Don't underestimate the impact of a breach.
Just find those mass locations and remove them from the data set.
Maciej is over-estimating the risk potential here. Or, to be more precise---the companies that have headquarters in the Valley are aware of the risk potential and have contingency plans to mitigate it.

Not that I'm against seeing some great software companies grow out of other geographic locations; I'm merely noting that it's not necessary to do so to avoid the threat of earthquake-related disruption. Threat known and accounted for.
Powershell is pretty powerful. You can do basically the same things as in bash.

However because of its youth, some equivalent tools are missing.
How Bots Manipulated The Price Of Bitcoin At Mt. Gox
> How would you do it, though? Pipe around JSON or XML? Then you just have data structures, but not objects

"just data structures" is a subset of objects - they are objects with data but no methods. i.e. DTOs. They're not always useful, but to say that they can't be accommodated in a pipeline because they "aren't objects" is not quite right.