skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got this error; are you a victim of your own popularity?

{"ParsedResults":[{"FileParseExitCode":-20,"ParsedText":"","ErrorMessage":"Timed out waiting for image parsing result or error generation by OCR","ErrorDetails":"System.TimeoutException: Timed out waiting for image parsing result or error generation by OCR\r\n bei OCRInteractionLibrary.OCRInteractor.GetResultForImage(String tempPath, String imageName, FileInfo imageFileInfo, Boolean isOverlayRequired, AccesorType accesorType) in d:\\1tmp\\OCRReaderSolution914\\OCRReaderSolution\\OCRInteractionLibrary\\OCRInteractor.cs:Zeile 259."}],"OCRExitCode":3,"IsErroredOnProcessing":false,"ErrorMessage":null,"ErrorDetails":null}
Great work! Do you have an example site? Is https://tinypressco.github.io/ made with it?

Looks awesome!
It's a tool, which can be used by anyone regardless of intention.

Much like a scalpel can be used to save lives of kill people.
"One user may install and use copies of the software to design, develop, test and demonstrate your programs. You may not use the software on a server in a production environment."

License: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/eula/windows_runtime_ocr_...
> NPM's approach to 'dependencies of dependencies' has a lot of fans.

NPM's approach works for Javascript because package A importing libfoo-1.0 and package B importing libfoo-2.3.11 doesn't cause any sort of global namespace collision for "Foo" within the JS runtime; each Foo is just a property of the object returned by require().

This isn't true of most other platforms; you can't e.g. import two versions of a Ruby library into the same Ruby runtime. (You can import two versions of an Erlang module into the same BEAM VM, but the second one will be treated as a code upgrade for the first. Processes that don't do a full-qualified tail-call will stay on the "old" version, though, so both versions can be loaded in parallel. There's still only one global "module table", though.)

On the other hand, the "packages get their own scratch namespaces which their dependencies can be exposed into" is true of Unix (or rather, can be made true by clever use of symlinks/chroots/etc.), which is why Nix can do what it does.
Portland Code School abruptly shutters, leaves students and instructors in limbo
Having used the combination of Gradle and Capsule in Java-land, I desperately want to equivalent for Python. A tool that can declarative state dependencies and bundle them into a single file (akin to a static binary) which has a single entry point and all dependencies included. For libraries, the JAR model works well too.
DMARC actually specifies exactly what the recipient should test and what they should to with the email.

They can easily ignore DMARC records, but at least you're still telling them what to do with failing email.
Noooooooo

This is a really terrible suggestion.

The last thing we need is another way to do things, that only takes care of, say, 70% of the functionality.

All that will happen is, someone now has to look through the simple interface, and decide oh wait, I need one feature this doesn't provide. Now your "solution" has made the problem worse, not better.

If you're going to provide this sort of simplified interface, you need to make damn sure a super majority of users never need to look past it. Otherwise you've done much more harm than good, by providing yet another competing alternative.

The real problem with packaging in Python is that users are asked to write this program, setup.py, that by itself should not be a very difficult program to write. Its tasks simply are not that complicated.

What makes it complicated is that they're then told that their program should consist of a single function call --- a call to this monstrously complicated setup() function, with a confusion of conflicting arguments.

This is a stupid way to write a program! This design decision is at the heart of the whole problem. The interface to setuptools, distribute, distutils etc is fucked and always will be fucked, because there's no way to provide a good interface to the functionality via a single function call.

That's why every semi-complicated setup script ends up having to monkey patch the internals of setuptools or distutils, to say, replace some of the Extension class machinery, or try to correct a compiler flag. It's because the design is fundamentally a failure. The whole idea does not work.

Things would be much easier if we had direct, simple control. You can provide a default fall-through, but it should be easy to route the "build_ext", "install", "sdist" etc commands to your own function.

Just tell us what our program needs to do and provide us a nice library of building blocks to do it, and we will write this program. Simple.

By far the majority of my tickets for my NLP library, spaCy, are related to packaging and installation. Why should putting some files onto a user's computer and zipping up some files on my machine and calling out to a compiler and specifying some dependencies be harder than understanding natural language?
It seems like given a public link including the decryption key, they could still be given a takedown request, since as soon as a rights holder sends them the link, they are no longer blind to the content. It does, however, preempt a Content ID like system.
>New passenger planes are extraordinarily expensive to develop, and only 2-3 corporations in the entire world are capable of it.

There would probably be more if it weren't for the vast subsidies thrown at both boeing and airbus. That pretty much locks out all potential from competition from anywhere except maybe China.
Hmmm... How about a one's complement system? For example if A owed B 24 dollars, A would wear the bands 1100111 = -24 and B would wear 0011000 = 24. This way, they would only need 7 bands between the two of them, yet each person would know how much they owed or were owed. Also, no matter the balance, each of the bands would be worn by one of them, so there would be no need to carry around extra bands.
From my own experience: You need the hiring manager to push HR along.

I recall one position that was stalled until I followed up with the hiring manager, who was early into the organization and had long tenure and a lot of influence.

I reached them directly. They said they'd put the request in to HR. We hung up after the hiring manager said they would give HR a follow-up call. Within 24 hours, HR was calling me, asking how soon I could come in.

Most hiring managers don't have that much influence with HR (instant turnaround). But if they hare a good reputation internally, and HR is good at their job, then HR knows that such strong interest is reason to proceed expeditiously.

If HR is unresponsive to them, a hiring manager with budget -- an internal client of HR -- then maybe that is a place you don't want to work. Disfunctional HR tends to become a burden, over time. (Perhaps I should say, abnormally disfunctional HR; some would argue that HR is inherently at least somewhat disfunctional, from the perspective of those outside of HR and Legal.)
Nuclear power is cheap, reliable, emissions-free–and struggling to keep up
Evolving Lacing Patterns for Bicycle Wheels
> Most states in America (all of them?) have an At-Will Employment law.

Yes, all of them.
In theory, `pex` can do exactly this. (In practice, I had a brief play with it and couldn't get it to work, YMMV.)
We could also consider that HN has a particular culture. No one foces anyone to live here. It's a community you can freely join and leave, which makes it only more important to protect the culture that makes it good.
The fall of the meritocracy
I think it's because of the context it was linked in. Mickens is a pretty smart guy and is known for the series of articles like this one; it's something you read to reflect on in between crying out of laughter.
The articles are simplified for a general audience. I think Motherboard tries hard to keep things digestible so as to let people dip their toes into the deep, cold pool of nerdom.
I think most applications would use a shared file system, just as they do today, including all the same optimisations. But your high performance database would likely be given its own disk to work with. (Just as you would today, but the benefits of giving a whole disk to a process in exokernel land are theoretically greater.)
Announcing My Retirement
The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Turns 30
Ask HN: Good intro CS course in Python?
I'm looking for a good intro CS course in Python that I can use to teach one of my relatives. Something that has materials, exercises, and a good structure to introduce CS concepts to them. Ideally it would give some exposure to 1) data structures, 2) algorithm analysis (ideally not through sorting if possible ...), 3) scope, and 4) IO and string modification. The target audience is someone with high aptitude and rudimentary programming experience. (Has written some code, but no exposure to concepts.)

Any suggestions?
A Look at the Internal Memos of Twitch and Periscope
Amazing! Although the draft is actually of 1 Esdras and Wisdom of Solomon, part of the intertestamental Apochrypha and not found in many editions that have only the New and Old Testaments. What happened to the translation drafts of the other 66 books? Does this mean we have more information on J. R. R. Tolkien's work (12 volumes) than we do of the original translators of the KJV bible (a fact that probably would have astonished and annoyed Tolkien)?
> - How would facebook detect nation-state attacks?

"We do this by a combination of traffic monitoring, incident tracking and utilizing cellular network infrastructure to notify the engineers responsible for sending the warning in time between the NSL reaching front desk and CEO becoming aware of its content."

> - How do we make the policy around it participative and open?

"Everyone is free to receive a warning about being targeted by a state or state-sponsored actor, regardless of race, religion, gender, income and sexual preferences of said actor."
Most of the time, yes. There is a law that protects certain types of workers (primarily factory workers, iirc) and mandates that they be given 6 weeks of notice. This notice period can be converted into 6 weeks of pay (that is, you have to pay them for six weeks, but you don't have to keep them in the building), an option companies almost always take.

However, when you hear these things about America, you should understand that just because the law doesn't require notice, doesn't mean it never happens. First, no one gives notice unless they're a complete amateur; it's always laid off immediately with severance. But in many cases, severance packages are given to the employee in exchange for a separation agreement that waives all potential claims against the company, and these are sometimes quite generous (I know one guy who received over a year of severance).

When you hear "America has no sick days", or "Americans can fire anyone they want at any time", or things like that, it just means that it's not mandatory for your employer to offer these. The majority, by far, do offer good benefits and PTO, and if the company is of a reasonable size, they usually offer some type of severance, because most good employees will not go near you if you don't have good benefit and PTO policies, and they won't go near you if they know that you never give employees a break when layoffs come around (as they inevitably do).
This is one area where I think Rust has a clear advantage of no baggage. They get to represent Some(T) as a null pointer in the None case.

I will say that having being exposed to Rust's Enums(sum types) I don't think I can ever go back. Combined with pattern matching it's a hell of a combo.
Halide: a language for image processing and computational photography
Facebook iOS App Scrapes Your Clipboard?
A Trello affair – 8 things we love about Trello
LtU thread:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5264
> should not run their own hardware.

Did you mean "should not run their own dedicated server"? The article doesn't mention anything related to hardware. It could have happened with a rented dedicated server, and even within a virtual machine.
It's definitely a GIANT leap forward for SFDC. I don't know the history of their UX team, but I don't believe there really was an earnest one until the "SFDC Style Guide" that the Salesforce1 mobile app was built with came out.

The browser interface up until this year has predated anything that the Salesforce UX team has created, so it's quite possibly finally signaling that @benioff is committing to even HAVING a UX team.
Get/Set Size of Hole in Doughnut Charts and Presentation Rendering to PDF, HTML
For a much deeper exploration of this kind of dynamic object behaviour in Tcl, Sean Woods' "Lifecycle Object Generators" is a fun read:

http://www.tclcommunityassociation.org/wub/proceedings/Proce...
Honest question from a developer perspective: Why there isn't any "best practice/hardened by default" wizard-style configuration, something people can do right after they install their OS? E.g.:

Welcome to Best Practice Linux. Click Next to continue. Which http server you want (httpd/lightttpd/...). Click Next to continue. (you get the idea).

Something like apt-get but with best-practice defaults.
You only see the website in Comic Sans, because you actually installed Comic Sans onto your system. The font isn't embedded, and those who didn't install it just see plain sans.
What a silly set of arguments:

1) "We have ethical responsibilities to cats as well as to biodiversity"

2) "[Compared to humans] are we really to believe that it is cats who are the enemy of biodiversity?"

3) "Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost."

To which I say:

1) There will always be more cats. We're nearly out of some of their prey, such as brush-tailed bettongs and mountain pygmy possums.

2) Your argument is humans are worse, therefore we shouldn't do anything about cats? Really?

3) This is a reasonable point, insofar as you can figure out an ethical way to deal with an undomesticated cat once you've caught it.
> In hindsight, I should have quit long before the company got into such dire straits, but it was an easy commute, and the co-workers were great people to work with

Not as experienced as you but as a younger guy I would like to share my experience - I lasted 4 years and few months before I was asked to go. Even though I never considered myself irreplaceable in a firm of 6K+ coders, it was a revelation how "business strategies" may "require you to be let go" which would be of course "better for your career". Finding another job was super easy for me (I believe that was because of my young developer age). But I was really bitter about the "let go" process and the way things were handled. It was only after few months that I realised that it was actually very good for my career and yes when I look back I see I should have left the place at least 3 years ago when things had started to change and I still didn't act. It was just a good salary, a very tightly knit team, and a relaxed work environment. I had gotten into the comfort zone. When I was out I took that long cherished 3 months cross country solo backpacking trip.

As for the emergency fund - yes, even for a younger person like me with no responsibilities or liabilities a medical insurance (I had been paying for one since I had joined - here in my country medical insurance in general means whatever your firm offers me and usually no one buys any medical insurance on their own) was something I had along with regular transfers from salary account to few deposit accounts and into some equity funds.

> Once you are over 50 like me, you need to be in a position financially to live several years without a paycheck

This! I have been planning for this as a retirement strategy now. Actually as an "involuntary retirement" strategy. It might sound naive and may actually be naive but when I am planning for my MS now, this is one of the use-cases I have in mind. With an MS I will have another career option (or rather call it freelancing) - teaching in colleges and universities as adjunct/visiting faculty. One of my lecturers (actually one of the better ones) did not have a PhD. He told us he was laid off from his job and he didn't want to find another job in the industry and he was considering a PhD (he was 53 at the time). He taught in some other colleges too.

And yes, a company may ask you to go at the first sign of trouble and hence I find it incredibly surprising when employees leaving a company at the first sign of trouble are frowned upon and are often called "disloyal" by some people.
https://arpnetworks.com/ is a pretty good provider, and has supported OpenBSD for many years now.
Why do you have a swipe icon in some places? Quite annoying when browsing on a laptop.
Getting employers to accept online bachelors is a lot harder than masters. Most jobs have bachelors requirements and an online degree will likely get flagged. But for a masters it can work as an added bonus.
Not by the hour but very inexpensive: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver
My humble opinion: Angellist's syndicates and the CSC fund are great for startups, a bit of a negative for the long tail of angel investors and a net positive for traditional VCs.

We're seeing a glut of capital at the seed investment stage, which means higher prices for all and more competition for hotter deals. This means that a lot of angels are getting forced out of a lot of deals they might have been in before, or have to enter a deal through a syndicate and take a 20-30% haircut on the carry.

On the other hand, we're seeing good startups getting funded now because of the excess capital -- startups that might have had a hard time raising because they didn't have the right cachet with the investor network and didn't hit the right milestones to make investment an easy case. A $25k investment today is going to be more expensive or more risky than a $25k investment a year ago.

The increase in startups coming down the pipe is a good thing for traditional VCs. More startups are going to pass the series A hurdles and find their way into the VC pipeline. The VCs will end up with a larger crop to select winners from.

If you don't have good dealflow as an angel right now, I'd say that it's a good time to sit out from the startup scene and become an LP in a fund or two instead.

Alternatively -- I'm biased here, admittedly -- US angels should take advantage of the strength of the US dollar and find some early-stage deals north of the border up here in Canada before AngelList opens up Canadian syndicates and the seed valuations rise up to meet the US valuations.
It's funny that a lot of Python's design hinges around having "one right way to do it", which is a strength of the language, and yet there's a million different ways to do packaging.

Python really needs one, and only one, true way to do packaging, but I think it's too late for that to happen now.
That's probably one of the worst ways of phrasing that, but they have a point.

I'm in love with biohacking and trying to start a biohackerspace myself in my city, but if we're reaching the level of actually making modifications to organisms at home, we really need to have a serious talk about it. Life is not a toy, it's self-replicating nanotech that's literally capable of killing people at scale.
What does the GPLv3 means for users? Does it propagate to the code generated?
I actually downloaded a .mobi version few days ago, it's waiting for me having some free time. I've recently finished Ra, and I am in love with this guy's fiction.
This isn't true in general, it's only true when T is a pointer type, in which case C++ would just use a pointer.
An interesting perspective and it seems like more science needs to be done to sort out the true scale of the problem. However I still don't take issue with using lethal means to control the problem, and I don't doubt in some areas it is a problem.

Looking at the issue pragmatically we're not going to see the political will to paying for a bait, neuter and release program. Meanwhile we're losing native prey species who cannot wait for the "ethical" solution to work its way through our parliament.
The point of most cloud servers is to abstract away the kind of low level architectural details you are looking at here, so kind of opposing goals.. why not just build a little Skylake home desktop and try it there? It is not expensive, maybe $800 tops and you get a nice development rig in the process.
It also makes it terribly un-fun wackamole for the rights holder.

If they had the files unencrypted, the rights holder could demand that every copy of file `foo` be removed.
With this design, multiple uploads of the same file are not identifiably the same by MEGA, so that case can't happen.

It's interesting that they decided the benefit of encryption (lessened responsibility, marketing) outweighed the cost of wasted storage space for dedupe-able content.
Pushing operating system abstractions into user-space was pretty much what IBM's VM/370[1] operating system did (starting in the late 1960s!). VM/370's control program (CP), which would be the "kernel" in today's terminology, controlled the physical hardware resources. Each "process" running under CP was a virtual machine whose operating system API was mostly just the IBM/370 instruction set (i.e., no abstraction above the hardware architecture). For example, CP provided only a virtual disk drive that you could manipulate with machine instructions like SIO (Start I/O) - the file system was implemented by the code running in user space. You could actually run a different guest operating system (i.e., a different set of OS abstractions at user level) on each virtual machine.

The authors of this paper do mention VM/370 in their "Related Work" section (page 5). They say their approach is similar, except that they "export" hardware resources rather than emulating them, which is more efficient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29
True, although using Cordova to wrap a good mobile site isn't too cost prohibitive. It seems a lot of small companies approach having an app as a marketing tool though. Not having an app is kinda like not having a website in 1999.
Meh, if they get severance equal to whatever other countries get, I much prefer the US system. Give people 4-6 weeks of pay but don't require (or allow) them in the office. It seems like it makes sense from the company's perspective to remove their access immediately, right? Of course, no one should find out by their badge not working...

Edit: it will of course be correctly noted by some that US requires no such severance and many employees get none. But then again, many do get some.
Do you mean react-native, or is there a reactive-native I'm unaware of?
Callbacks in C++ using template functors (1994)
Could someone explain how it is that someone discovers something that is already in a University archive? It seems people are discovering these kinds of things every few years.
CoreOS and SELinux together is pretty secure if set up properly; even if you broke out of a container you wouldn't be able to do anything, even start a process. But still, yeah, in a unikernel there is no 'breaking out' at all.