skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
-Write locks/file ownership. Bob maintains the master schedule spreadsheet and no one else is allowed to touch it.
Mary gets given access and leaves it open and goes to lunch and Bob can't update it for the rest of the afternoon.

-Multiple sources of the truth. I've seen spreadsheets used in lieu of professional estimating tools for pricing jobs, and been abused because I wasn't use the "latest version" of the spreadsheet that got cc'ed around at 11pm called estimate July 24 v11a LATEST.xlsx

-Fudge factors and spaghetti formulas. You can take a nearly complete data set and essentially manipulate it to tell any story with inconsistent formulas, hidden columns, references from other sheets etc.

-VBA extends capabilities but is has some serious performance issues, doesn't implement objects correctly, doesn't handle errors well, code can't be version controlled.

-Gets used to do a poor job of purpose built software that the business has licenses for, like estimating/scheduling/MRP because of a lack of training.

-Business logic usually isn't apparent or documented and has to be reverse engineered to be understood.

-Propagates silos within businesses as they decentralise data and tend to diverge.
Perfectly sensible question! Meanings of words drift. And these are historic real-world movements; the definitions don't come from dictionaries.

Orwellian propaganda muddies the waters: the Nazis called themselves "socialists"; East Germany under the Soviet Union called itself the "German Democratic Republic".

These quotes seem to be helpful:

"I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense, [analogous to] a system in which the state integrates labor and capital under their control. The ideal is top-down control with the public essentially following orders." (http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Noam_Chomsky_Corporations.h...)

"Now, as far as socialism is concerned, that term has been so evacuated of content over the last century, that it’s hard even to use. I mean, the Soviet Union was called a socialist society by the two major propaganda operations in the world: the western one and the Soviet one. They both called it socialism for opposite reasons." (https://tansafte.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/some-footnotes-for...)
Personal collection of 24,000 records discovered
How to Use Real Estate Trends to Predict the Next Housing Bubble
Scientists Find Evidence of Small-Scale Farming 23,000 Years Ago in Israel
What about templates? For some reason, C programmers only seem to comment about the OO parts of C++ and never talk about templates. When you bring variadic templates into the mix, it's just more awesomeness.

And, before you mention it, use clang to avoid getting the page long templates related errors.
Maybe Parboiled rice is the alternative. Here the rice with the husk is first boiled and water drained off. It also boost its nutritional profile and change its texture[1].
In many places the par boiled rice while cooking is boiled again with excess water and the water is drained away.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parboiled_rice
BPG image compression vs. JPG
Athletes would kill themselves very quickly. Have you ever heard of Goldman dilemma?: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma

Also the 50% of athletes willing to do anything would make it unfair for athletes that wish to perform naturally, always creating a divide in tested vs untested events. Money talks and sponsorship would likely be limited for any non tested version.
And how does one do it right? This seems like a dismissive defense for a very legitimate concern.
Turing by Nominet – massive scale DNS analytics with a minority report interface
I am a back end dev, who gets to dabble in JavaScript every so often, but never enough to consider myself an expert in any way.

I have tried Angular and there are way to many concepts for the amount of time I get to spend on it. React (after three days) is refreshingly simple. Well so far.....
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Linkurious. Our products are used by data scientists and less experienced-users.

We have an open-source graph visualization JS tookit called linkurious.js: https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js

We also offer a commercial product to visualize Neo4j stored graphs: https://linkurio.us/product/
I don't think it applied to the version used on the web. However, this is just from memory based on conversations I had with MPEG and JPEG board members a long time ago. I can't find any sources so I could be mistaken.
In most areas that malaria is a risk, there are also other diseases being carried by mosqitoes: Dengue and Chikungunya come to mind. I live in a country where malaria is a risk, and most people from the countryside don't know any specifics, other than "mosquitoes make you sick". When you go to a poor village and ask the elders what they need, they almost always say "mosquito nets" since there are always some poor families that cannot afford them.

I wouldn't consider it a risk, unless doctors and government officials would explicitly start teaching that the nets are no longer required, which I don't expect happening any time soon.
Emacs comes with a couple of built in spreadsheets: ses-mode supports emacs lisp formula in cells, org-mode tables allow simple formulas in table cells. Furthermore, there are half a dozen or so other packages that users have written that are older or are more specialized in some way. See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SpreadSheet.

All of these spreadsheets are, naturally, written in emacs lisp.
It appears according to the abstract that it beats other languages while being implemented as "just a library":

"Our library-only implementation (...)
For many uses, it equals or outperforms equivalent code in
languages with built-in type-switching constructs, such as
OCaml and Haskell"

In my opinion major weakness of C++ is just that the linker features more or less remained out of the language design. Turbo Pascal already shown eons ago the advantages of having modules instead of obj files. The slowness of compilation is still the major problem of C++ compared to the languages like Turbo Pascal and more recently Go.
Thanks for clarifying. I think tail call conversion to iteration for Java bytecode could be added to a JVM implementation without changing the spec, and you could also do it when converting F# to bytecode. Apparently it's on the todo list but not high priority.

Stack allocation is trickier if it's specified in F# code, because it isn't part of the VM spec, but automatic stack allocation for Java has been demonstrated in a research context and I think either HotSpot or J9 can do it too.

The method size limit is something like 2^16 bytecodes, but even if that's a problem, JITs are free to inline beyond that as much as they want.

So, I agree it would take some work but I don't think it's fundamentally impractical. Adding stack allocation to the class file format would be the hardest thing to push through I think.
I didn't mean to imply that drug companies have an obligation to produce products that aren't commercially viable. I understand that's just not the way the world works at the moment. I was just curious whether anyone knew whether lack of commercial viability was the reason we haven't seen a malaria vaccine yet.

Thirty years to reach this point isn't necessarily representative of the actual effort expended on finding a malaria vaccine. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the same number of working hours goes towards treatments for male pattern baldness each year as has gone into a malaria vaccine over thirty years.
>However, JPEG was also patented and that did pretty well.

I was under the impression that the free implementations (like libjpeg) did not use and of the patented techniques (such as arithmetic coding which patent recently expired) ?

>I think WebP stands a pretty good chance of supplanting JPEG on the web but it will still be used in lots of places.

I don't think anything will supplant JPEG as the de facto image format on the 'web', it's simply 'good enough' and of course free and supported everywhere.

Also as for lossy compression I'm not sure WebP is a real improvement over JPEG, I'd love to see it used instead of PNG for lossless compression though, as here it is clearly superior.
Who gives a shit about "charm". Last year I had a connection that due to delays on the incoming flight left me with 8 minutes from the time we got shuttled into the terminal to the time my outgoing flight gate closed, and it wasn't even in the same terminal. I ran over to the other terminal, went through the insecurity controls, and made the flight, with several minutes of time to spare. I know of no other airport where something like that would be possible.
Other people have mentioned this but Mirror's Edge is particularly bad for that. I felt similarly and basically threw it away. I do not seem to have a problem with VR as long as I'm standing up and changing direction by actually turning.. if I use a stick to rotate instead, it causes unease.
For a simple viz of graph data, I'd would use linkurious.js[0] (it's a very active fork of sigma.js)

Disclaimer: I work on it ;)

[0]:https://github.com/Linkurious/linkurious.js/
This is perhaps the most enlightening article that I have read so far. It does explain current dynamics in real estate market where prices are getting red hot because inventory is at historic low levels (because new constructions have slowed dramatically since 2008). Meanwhile population in the urban areas had been continue to grow putting pressure on rents and house prices. It's simple delayed feedback loop system that explains lot of things and data from past boom and current state fits pretty well with this theory.

The big question is how long this cycle will last. The 18 years mentioned in article seems too high. Currently construction activities are 1/3 of the size than boom period and I would estimate it catches up in 2-3 years. Then hyper supply period should start which should last again 2-3 years. So 4-6 seems like target for recession phase and 2-3 years before house prices starts becoming declining.
This is something that is very important to understand - all human activities can devolve into an authoritarian/totalitarian condition akin to fascism, no matter the original intent. We are all capable of becoming the very totalitarians we despise - even despising totalitarianism can, itself, become a form of authoritarian dogma which overrules individual freedom.

The key is, dogma.
Linkurious CTO here :)

Our product connects to Neo4j databases and enables full-text search, visualization design (select nodes/edges, apply size/color to nodes/edges according to properties) with a point-and-click interface.

Try it out: http://linkurio.us/demo/ (the "create account" button generates a temporary login/password for the demo)
Linux Voice issue 8 is now Creative Commons
> However, JPEG was also patented and that did pretty well.

This is exactly the bit I was referring to (the arithmetic coding method). The rest of CCITT/ITU baseline spec was unencumbered, that's what everyone ended up using.

Source: me, who implemented a baseline JPEG codec in late '90s.
Should your boss be tweeting moreor not at all?
Taking on Starbucks would mean having nice seats and free wifi. Starbucks is not a coffee company. Coffee is just how they get you inside and start spending money. Or maybe that's different in LA. In Germany there are many shops where you can take a coffee to go with about the same quality as Starbucks but 20-40% cheaper. People only buy Starbucks if they plan to sit in a Starbucks.

Never the less, I think Wheelys can take on Coffee2Go companies without problems.
The snark and heavy handed moderation helps keeping content useful and correct.
Don't have any examples, that's why my money is on tampering.
Bolt is WordPress done right(er)
You can create a public resume on Resumonk. e.g. https://www.resumonk.com/aditya

Disclaimer: I'm the Co-Founder of Resumonk.
Hehe ... I had a similar experience but my solution was to just read it (as well as many other tech blogs) use feed readers. I almost never go to the actual website (The Verge, Mashable, Re/Code, RWW, Anandtech, Android Police, ...).
I wish there was a interface for data analysis that people could cut and paste any data into it and it outputs a magical spreadsheet that business people can use.
That's the one! I've used it before and was struggling to remember the name the other day.
What if amphetamines (or some other stimulants) were to become a thing in the IT industry and that workers had no other choice to take some to meet standard performance or be unemployed? All for the benefit of the employers?

That's pretty much what's going on for professional athletes... now, I wouldn't like being forced to take some drugs to be able to make a living. And if we say it's ok to do it for professional sports, how long until someone says it should be ok in other fields?
Nim targets compilation to C and (I presume C-flavored) C++: http://nim-lang.org/

In terms of playing nice Rust is doing great (no GC, and can create static libraries linkable by C/C++ compilers), but unfortunately requires going through plain C interface.
> doesn't just cut your userbase by half

Even more, considering Android takes up about 80% of the market share. Focusing on iOS first is a well known strategy, but if you gain any traction - Android release should be out quickly. There is no excuse to ignore that big amount of market share.
To the americans here, please understand that socialism is NOT communism. Socialism is regrouping a lot of different things (including the most extreme form of communism) and please do not mix the two together.
> It was more that it didn't offer enough benefits. It was "the files are a bit smaller".

Well it was more than that: it offered unlimited color depth for example, a big progress from 8 bit per channel. It was technically superior format in nearly every respect.
I made some fixes to the Qt backend a year ago, but gave up again rather quickly. There are some rather big chunck missing and as others have said it's actually getting worse. For example the Sailfish people removed the component that renders native buttons, because that would have been a lot of work to port to Qt 5. (So now you only get the rather ugly XUL implemented controls)
RAD is some of the worst software I ever used, I get angry just thinking about it.
The significant word there is student. CS departments started using Java for an awful lot of teaching. I would wager that plenty of those "hard" OSS projects have a genesis in academia, and even if not that Java became a sort of lingua franca for writing code you wanted discussed or accepted in that sort of way.
No matter how elegant things are, the garbage collected, the pointers untoucheable, the libarys all optimized and readymade and the code jit-compiled to get near C - on the day your C ustomer demands that one feature too much - you want to have C ontroll.
Ask HN: How's your eyesight?
Ever since I first discovered computing I've had people tell me that all this staring at screens is going to destroy my eyesight. A quick search seems to indicate that this is actually controversial. Some say staring at screens for too long damages eyesight, while other sites say there is no harm done.

Whether it is the screens or not - my eyesight is pretty knackered.

Just wondered what other peoples experiences are.

Is there a "safe" way to stare at screens for 75% of your waking day? There are some people who claim that there are things you can do to fix your eyes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_method) but these claims seem highly debated. Has anyone had any luck with them?
It basically works the same way the "self-referential" fib does, doesn't it?

fibs = 0 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibs (tail fibs)
Russia also had the Winter Olympics (and Snow when it's 10C outside is expensive)
The guy i mentioned above (http://mrcotton.com/) charges €2.20 which at current rates is over $2.40 for a black coffee, more for cappucio etc. He's usually outside my office for approx 90 mins and some back of the envelope points to him making over $200 in that time. Ant that's not SF, that's Cork Ireland
Annual performance reviews are annoying and don't make sense anymore because we need faster feedback loops for everyone really.
The half-assed actor project mentioned by the article is probably ActorFx - which is an interesting project with some cool ideas. For exammple, you could write actors in a mix of languages like Python, JS, & C#. It had automatic state replication after each turn. Actors were observable, Rx-style. Actor behavior could be specified at runtime: you could effectively throw a JS closure into the cluster and it create an actor out of it.

I wonder, though why it became stagnant so soon and never gained momentum. I'm don't know, but I have a theory. The team were using some tech which was semi-secret at the time, which they weren't allowed to talk about: Service Fabric (known as Windows Fabric at the time). Fabric was in use in projects like Lync Server and Service Bus Server, but no one could talk openly about it.

How can you develop an open-source distributed system without being able to mention the framework which makes it all possible? Fabric handles ActorFx' high availability, service discovery, code distribution/upgrades, and their state replication. It's pretty difficult... Forum posts asking what this fabric thing was went unanswered and the people who may have been interested in ActorFx just moved on.

Regarding Orleans, there were probably a couple of internal actor frameworks in use at some large .NET houses, but they were never released to the public. I think it was more of a cultural issue than a lack of devs: .NET devs weren't used to sharing code.

Things are getting better. The community around Orleans is great (come join us on Gitter! https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans) and the ecosystem as a whole feels to be gaining momentum.
10 Game Development Tools You May Not Know About
Most YC startups do something new, enabled by new technology - typically the internet.

Does this startup rely on some technological development that meant it wasn't posible before? eg in making the whole thing small enough; "pour over" coffee (whatever that is); eff/cheapness of solar panels etc?

NB not necessarily a selling point itself, but something that enables one.
I hold the exact opposite opinion, and would never want to work on a plain C project. It is so low level that one has to write a lot of plumbing code to take care of error handling and resource management.
It's also missing pretty much all higher-level concepts that are fast and can make code easier to write, read and less error-prone. Overall, it's simply not fun to write C code, there's a lot of tedious manual work, and even if you do everything according to the book you might oversee something and have problems. Well-written C++ completely eliminates some classes of problems, just like Rust's type system can eliminate even more issues.

C is so tedious to write that even if I didn't have access to C++ I would try something else first when the need to write cross-platform/performant code would come.

The point is: it's not appropriate to evangelise C (or any other language) without pointing out some of its major disadvantages. This is simply spreading misinformation.
Lego limbs help amputee children
Is there a more recent version than 7.16 from 2002?
http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/apps/financial/spreadsheet/
You make a good point about other mosquito-borne diseases. I suspect that at the margins some degree of risk homeostasis will occur nonetheless, but that seems like it will quite likely be mitigated by this point.

You're also very much correct about this being a public health issue. As much as possible, care will need to be taken to ensure education is administered with any vaccinations.
"""The firm is also full of jokers who haven't got a clue about software and don't even think it's a technology company."""

From (limited) experience this is true for many technology consultants. Unfortunately it's also somewhat common practice for business software projects that involve a small/medium sized software company and a gigantic client that the client requires the involvement of Accure et al. to feel more secure.
Sadly it is not uncommon to have the consulting "software experts" do nonsensical tasks just so that they are not touching important stuff.

These days, I am very skeptical about getting involved in any software projects that involve big name consultants.
Like snapping a photo or a video, and adding a caption is just a feature?
IBM makes some of the worst, most bloated, buggy and overpriced software I every used: RAD and WAS. They are so bad they are a torture on the developer. There are no technical reasons for choosing them. I get angry just thinking about it.
Fun, but you should really make it render with real emojis so people can copy/paste the results.
Mines pretty knackered too and it's definetly due to staring at screens in the night in dark. I'd love to know if there are methods to improve eyesight or eye health.
By washing rice you remove starch dust. And starch is what makes rice sticky.
You can use OpenDocument Format files. These are supported by most spreadheet implementations. It comes in two variants:
1) a zip file with XML inside
2) a single XML file

http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/os/OpenDocument-v1.2-...
The Medallion Fund cited appears to be the one that made its impressive returns by gaming the tax system:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-03/the-irs-chal...
There are predictive short term patterns, but once the knowledge of the patterns spreads, they start to disappear. There is also constant change in long term patterns because the world outside financial market changes unexpected ways.

Financial markets are self reflecting system where people who invest are inside the the system and change it.

If you discover pattern that makes money, you must keep it secret and establish firm that tries to exploit it. If you are successful, others notice it and start to analyze your game and the edge starts to disappear. You may use machine learning to discover constantly new patterns but that does not change the situation, because others also use machine learning to detect new patterns.

Portfolio managers seeking high alpha are often poker players, because Poker and alpha seeking are very similar games.
Sounds reasonable. Perhaps the 'ism' is the problem; it sounds like an encompassing ideology rather than a tool.
Back in 2000, a winner of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC), had an implementation of an X-based graphical spreadsheet in 2kB of very unreadable C: http://www.ioccc.org/2000/jarijyrki.c . Details here: http://www.ioccc.org/2000/jarijyrki.hint
Passive income sources (summer 2015)
What is your source of passive income? Context: http://goo.gl/0zjoKp

My sources: automated Twitter/Facebook pages about popular TV shows and am working on a tool for freelance devs (http://www.recurvoice.com)

Earlier editions of this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7094402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6661536

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4639271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387789

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5903868
5 Secret Smoothie Ingredients
Nor necessarily mutated or radioactive. This can be triggered by several pathogens or weather damage also.

But, if is mutated by radioactivity and is a stable mutation then you have a new and perfectly marketable product.