Hacker News Reader

willhsladeon Scientists Likely Found Way to Grow New Teeth for Patients

Well, yes and no. No, in that babies aren't born with exposed teeth in their mouth. Yes, in that babies have two sets of teeth in their skull when born.

willhsladeon Guide to Software Defined Radio

Plus, Canada.

willhsladeon Life expectancy in the U.S. is declining for middle-aged people of all groups

Care to expound?

willhsladeon Bye Bye Microsoft Office, Hello LibreOffice

Take all of this with a grain of salt: I'm an Excel and VBA developer. I'm a bit of a dinosaur and I'm looking to pivot to Java + JavaScript as I'm just a smidge underpaid.

However, I have this to say about Excel. MicroSoft is making a push to kill VBA with two prong. One, replace VBA with JavaScript through OfficeJS. Two, beef up Power Query and Power Pivot so that you can do enough ETL in Excel through a point and click interface.

But the nasty truth is that on the ground in offices worldwide, there are ETL flows that shouldn't exist, but middle managers do not possess the political capital, incentives, or technical skill to remove. And while Power Query, M, DAX and Power Pivot are excellent, in, let's say, 5% of workflows, you need some business logic in some language that is more flexible. And this is the real problem with VBA; it papers over dirty workflows, even if the data structures you are provided are not good.

willhsladeon Blizzard Cancels Overwatch Event

Per se.

willhsladeon Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

$12M but sure.

willhsladeon WeWork Rivals Pitch to Win Back Market Share, Try Not to Gloat

Give them time.

willhsladeon Edward Snowden says he would like to return home

They are assuming left leaning Presidents will do the right thing. It's, at best, a little naive.

willhsladeon Recognizing the signs of disruption in our urban habitat

Where in Toronto? I don't really notice this phenomenon.

willhsladeon U.S. Farmers Stung by Tariffs Now Face a $3.5B Corn Loss

You produce at a loss? Is this a serious question?

willhsladeon Survivors of rare wolf attack recount how animal tried to drag man from tent

To be completely fair, weren't wolves aggressively eradicated and only recently reintroduced in some areas of North America?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_distribution

willhsladeon A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises

Well, if you dig deep enough holes, they will. That's how over a million people live in the Rajasthan desert in India.

willhsladeon No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

Or, less dismissively, commitment.

willhsladeon Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game

The buck still broke in 2008; that's what started the crisis.

willhsladeon The insulin racket: why a drug made free 100 years ago is recently expensive

CVS owns Aetna, for one.

willhsladeon Lyft vs. Uber: A Tale of Two S-1’s

How is Uber, a company that has never made money, and has competitors in every market in taxi cabs, too big to fail? TBTF refers to banks, not side investments from SoftBank and Saudi Arabia.

willhsladeon Avoiding a transit of the United States

Wow. I'm surprised that 90% is domestic for the busiest airport in the world, but I'm Canadian.

Thanks!

willhsladeon Avoiding a transit of the United States

I'm assuming this is Atlanta? Got a source?

willhsladeon Carnegie Mellon Launches Undergraduate Degree in Artificial Intelligence

Care to elaborate?

willhsladeon Excel Adds JavaScript and Power BI Support

I think this is the real reason why we will never see Python inside Excel. The other, minor, reason is that Guido has pretty much pooped all over the idea of backwards compatibility in Python, which is pretty much integral to Microsoft's vision.

willhsladeon Tesla's Simultaneous Brilliance and Incompetence Revealed in Teardown of Model 3

My phone can't kill me, nor others.

willhsladeon I wandered off and built an IDE

Via MS Query? ADO? OLAP cubes? Care to elaborate for the newbs?

willhsladeon Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ

When he's doing Stalinesque things.

willhsladeon The Declining Value of a CS Master's Degree (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5786720

willhsladeon Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

ADP too.

willhsladeon Learning to program is getting harder

I'd say Excel, but potato, potato.

willhsladeon People who are less willing to apologize also tend to be less self-compassionate

Speaking as someone who has a lot of experience with people who don't apologize in their immediate family, apologies do one thing and do it well. They de-escalate situations in which honest mistakes have been made, and decrease resentment over time for those mistakes. People who don't apologize create the impression that they don't actually care about other peoples' feelings, and guess what: we notice that.

willhsladeon Y Combinator is accepting applications for S18

Source please?

willhsladeon Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

Can everyone read this and vote this up in the survey? This is the real LPT.

willhsladeon I went to production heaven

The "mindshare" of the US elite has been in law and finance.