A Beginner's Guide to Using Excel for Data Analytics

Excel is a widely used spreadsheet application that serves as a foundational tool for data organization, cleaning, analysis, and visualization in corporate environments. Key features such as the Ribbon, filtering, and Find and Replace help users navigate and clean messy datasets efficiently. Functions like TRIM, CONCAT, UPPER, and LOWER standardize text data, while data validation prevents errors at the point of entry. Conditional formatting allows users to visually highlight patterns, outliers, and duplicates through dynamic, rule-based cell formatting. Advanced functions including COUNTIF, SUMIF, AVERAGEIF, and various date-time formulas enable users to perform complex calculations and statistical analysis across large datasets.

Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-nyc.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49542443 Points: 20 # Comments: 1

Govt bodies differ, Centre to test green crackers afresh

How Shopify Manages Extreme Traffic Spikes During Flash Sales

During flash sales, thousands of users simultaneously hit the same product pages, creating a concentrated load spike rather than evenly distributed traffic across a platform. Unlike static assets, critical operations such as inventory checks, cart updates, discount calculations, and order writes all compete for shared database resources, making them far more expensive to handle. Shopify addressed this by horizontally sharding its database and then further isolating stores into routing units called pods, each backed by its own dedicated datastore cluster. This pod architecture ensures that a high-traffic store's database load does not directly compete with other merchants' stores, limiting the blast radius of any single spike. Additional safeguards such as backpressure, bounded queues, early overload responses, and idempotent retries are described as essential to keeping checkout functional and the system recoverable during peak demand.

How to Build an Accessible Quantity Spinbutton for E-Commerce and Booking Apps

A developer named Mica has published a detailed guide on building accessible and functional quantity spinbutton components, commonly used in e-commerce, hotel booking, and restaurant reservation platforms. The component consists of two buttons for incrementing and decrementing a value, plus a text input where users can type or adjust quantities using arrow keys. The article outlines keyboard interaction patterns, including support for Home and End keys, and Apple keyboard substitutes using Command or Fn shortcuts. It also covers screen reader behavior for both NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS, detailing how focus and browse modes affect user interaction. The author emphasizes that poor implementation of this UI pattern can harm both sales and the experience of users with disabilities.

Silent retries masked a degrading pipeline until it finally broke

A software team discovered that their automated agent pipeline had been silently deteriorating for months, even as every run continued to report a passing status. The root cause was that successful retries were indistinguishable from first-attempt successes in summary logs, effectively hiding a growing failure rate. Over roughly 90 days, the share of runs requiring a second attempt climbed from zero to nearly 50 percent before the system finally produced a visible failure. The team's fix was to log attempt counts as a separate metric alongside pass/fail outcomes, enabling trend analysis rather than relying solely on binary alerts. The episode highlighted a broader instrumentation gap: systems built only to answer 'did it work' lack the vocabulary to warn that a failure is quietly being assembled.

Why AI coding agents need auditable runs, not just passing test reports

When an AI coding agent reports that tests passed, that report is only as reliable as the execution evidence backing it up, according to a software engineering analysis. The core problem is that agent logs typically record what the agent claimed, not what actually ran, creating a gap between stated outcomes and verifiable facts. The author argues developers should distinguish clearly between requests — what a user asked the agent to do — and results — what was actually executed by the provider or tool. To make agent runs truly auditable, observations should be graded by source strength, from mere tool acceptance up to provider-confirmed metadata bound to a specific invocation. Crucially, all evidence should be tied to an exact commit hash rather than a branch name or conversation summary, since even a perfectly audited run cannot prove the underlying code is correct.

AI Interfaces Could Finally Make Super Apps Viable, Analysts Argue

Super apps — platforms bundling dozens of services in one place — have long struggled due to overwhelming and complex user interfaces. Commentators now argue that AI-driven conversational interfaces remove that core barrier by replacing multiple screens with a single dialogue. Instead of navigating menus, users can simply state their needs and the app executes the task directly. This shifts complexity away from the user and onto the underlying model's reasoning capabilities. The argument is that success in the next wave of super apps will depend not on feature count, but on minimising the steps between a user and their goal.

Automate Rollbacks First: The Missing Half of Release Engineering

Software engineer Sergey Shinder argues that while most teams invest heavily in automating deployments, they neglect the equally critical process of rolling back to a stable version. Rollbacks typically happen under pressure — during outages, with stakeholders watching — making them far more error-prone than planned deployments. Shinder measures release maturity by a single metric: how many minutes and manual steps stand between a failed release and a restored working version. He recommends treating rollbacks as a one-button automated operation, ensuring database migrations are backward-compatible, and using feature flags to disable broken behaviour without a full rollback. His core principle is that a resilient release system is not one that never ships bugs, but one that can recover from them in thirty seconds rather than an hour of panic.

Vidact Compiler Converts React Code Into Direct DOM Operations

Vidact is a new compiler tool designed to transform React code into direct Document Object Model (DOM) operations. The project aims to improve web application performance by bypassing React's virtual DOM layer. By compiling React-style code into native DOM calls, Vidact seeks to reduce runtime overhead. The tool was shared on Hacker News, where it attracted early community attention and discussion.

Why AI Strategy Should Eliminate Processes, Not Just Automate Them

A growing critique argues that most businesses are misusing AI by simply adding chatbots to existing broken workflows rather than rethinking operations. The core argument is that effective AI adoption should make slow, manual processes unnecessary rather than merely faster. Examples cited include week-long approval chains, manually compiled reports, and customer queries waiting in human queues. Companies that focus on eliminating redundant steps entirely are predicted to outperform those that simply layer AI tools onto current systems. The piece urges business leaders to shift their thinking from 'where can we add AI' to 'which processes should no longer exist.'

FBI Investigates Massive Data Breach Exposing Driver's License Information

The FBI has reportedly launched an investigation into a large-scale data breach that is currently unfolding. The incident came to light after a journalist discovered their driver's license data was being sold online shortly after renting a car. The breach appears to be linked to data collected during the car rental process. Authorities are actively monitoring the situation as the full scope of the leak remains unclear.

Google Shifts Gemini Notebook to Compute-Based Limits With 5-Hour Resets

Google announced on August 28, 2026, that Gemini Notebook will replace fixed daily usage caps with flexible, compute-based limits starting September 2, 2026, for consumer accounts on web and mobile. Under the new system, how much usage a task consumes depends on factors such as prompt complexity, model features, chat length, and attached sources. Usage limits will now reset every five hours instead of once daily, giving users more frequent opportunities to resume work after hitting a cap. A new 'Generate later' feature allows users to defer resource-intensive outputs like Video Overviews and Slide Decks for processing once capacity is restored, with a notification sent when ready. Higher usage allowances are available through Google's AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscription plans, though specific quota figures were not disclosed.

Supreme Court Rules BCI Chair Tenure Fixed at 2 Years, Cannot Be Self-Extended

The Supreme Court of India has ruled that the tenure of the Bar Council of India (BCI) chairperson is limited to two years. The court held that the BCI cannot extend this tenure to five years through its own internal resolution. The judgment reinforces that a statutory body cannot unilaterally alter terms of office set by law. The case also reportedly involved concerns over lavish spending by the council's leadership.

Dark Spear Platform Uses AI for Pentesting While Keeping Humans in Control

Dark Spear is an AI-assisted penetration testing platform designed to automate security assessments without operating as a fully autonomous exploitation engine. The platform enforces scope boundaries, dangerous tool approvals, and evidence integrity through a trusted backend server rather than relying on client-side controls. It features three core components: a browser-based assessment engine, a backend enforcement bridge, and a SecOps reporting console for findings and remediation planning. Unlike traditional scanners, its AI agent can dynamically decide next steps during an engagement, but all actions are subject to server-side allowlisting and human approval gates. The architecture was built to treat security boundaries as engineering constraints rather than prompt-level instructions, ensuring findings remain verifiable and defensible.

Excel Remains a Key Data Analytics Tool Despite Rise of Python and SQL

Microsoft Excel continues to be widely used for data analysis across industries due to its low learning curve and powerful built-in features such as pivot tables, formulas, and charts, all without requiring coding skills. The spreadsheet application organizes work through a grid of rows, columns, and cells, supported by an interface that includes a Ribbon toolbar, Formula Bar, Name Box, and worksheet tabs. Excel supports four core data types — text, numbers, dates/times, and Boolean values — which users can enter and edit directly within any cell. Formatting tools allow users to adjust the visual appearance of data, including font styles and number formats, without altering the underlying values. Data cleaning, a critical step in analytics, involves using Excel's built-in features to identify and correct duplicate, incomplete, or incorrectly entered data to ensure accuracy and consistency.

Developer Uses System Design and Gamification to Master Cloud Engineering

A technical writer with cloud infrastructure experience is shifting focus toward becoming a proficient cloud engineer by adopting a system design-based learning approach. Over the past three weeks, they have been studying Linux, Docker, CI/CD, Terraform, and AWS, but found traditional learning methods led to overwhelm and "tutorial hell." Their new strategy centers on understanding how business decisions drive tool choices, using real-world and simulated scenarios for hands-on practice. To make learning more engaging, they are gamifying the process, including playing Bandit, a Linux-based learning game. They are also seeking recommendations for similar gamified tools covering Terraform, AWS, Docker, and Git.

Wisconsin farm family fought tax change; 2,000 floodplain acres now protected

Uber exits Nigeria and Uganda operations immediately

Uber has announced the immediate shutdown of its ride-hailing operations in Nigeria and Uganda. The move marks a significant retreat from two of Africa's key markets. Nigeria, the continent's most populous country, has proven to be a particularly challenging environment for ride-hailing companies. The decision reflects broader difficulties that on-demand transport services face in operating profitably across certain African markets.

OpenAI's Astra Model Uses New 'Recurrent Depth' Technique, Raising Safety Concerns

OpenAI has introduced a new AI model called Astra that employs a technique known as 'recurrent depth.' Unlike most reasoning models, which follow a sequential thinking process, Astra is designed to operate beyond those conventional constraints. This departure from standard reasoning architecture has drawn concern from AI safety experts. The development marks a notable shift in how OpenAI is approaching reasoning capabilities in its models.