skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fees for card payments are a US thing, mostly because they predominantly use credit instead of debit I believe.
PDFBox can't do that.

Apache OpenOffice API used to be able to do this. Not sure about output quality. Also not sure if LibreOffice API too supports it.

You might also want to evaluate a commercial framework like Aspose [1] (not affiliated, I've just come across their marketing pieces)

[1]: http://www.aspose.com/docs/display/slidesnet/Converting+Pres...
> It's to evade taxes and launder money!

Assuming the government have the right to tax us for everything all the time and that you are not a free man but just a number. This past year I have seen one new tax introduced at regional level and seen at least one other rise by a significant margin (close to 50%). I don't see a like change in the earnings of my colleagues. Maybe we should all try harder to evade the govt, at least a little.

Have you read the linked article, because most of the things you mention are not related to the point discussed in the article. Yes, there are good reasons for electronic transactions, of course there are.
Google, The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Edelman all strongly courted Obama staffers in 2012 during and after the election. There are many close ties between these companies and the current administration. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if movements.org was simply another funnel for these organizations to continue to splash money and favors in their direction.

How depressing would it be to know your job and existence is basically a bribe, with no expectation to make a meaningful contribution to the world? I'm picturing some enterprising recent college graduate thinking they're going there to change the world and getting laughed out of the room after laying out a plan to make them more effective. I need a shower just thinking about it.
When I interview candidates, the make or break question for me is does the person possess critical thinking skills?

Various things may point one way or another for this, but it is a mistake to assume [insert working at a particular company] is an indication that someone has to have the skills, as well as to assume someone not having [insert pet qualification] is an indication that someone does not have these skills.

Sadly, there is a severe lack of this skill applied in our profession, and it is probably the costliest common mistake I see.
Technology moves so fast that I'm not sure it even pays to become the actual expert anymore

Don't master the 'surface' technology, master the underlying concepts. For example, rather than trying to master this week's cool machine learning library, master the underlying mathematics and you'll not only be far ahead of most people who only mastered the library, but you'll happily be able to transfer your skills to the next machine learning library with minimal effort for the rest of your career.
> Since it's unaccountable, I tend to spend it more frivolously.

Which is fine!

Here's what you do: allot a certain amount of cash to discretionary expenses each month. You take that money out at the beginning of each month (actually in my case, twice a month) and then use it. And when you run out you're out.

What you've just done is used physical cash to put a hard ceiling on your discretionary spending. This turns what are normally variable expenses into a fixed item in your budget, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to account for.
Ah. Not my experience. I've usually gotten good salary/lots of options. But in SF it may be different.
> You meant "cost for government," right?

Well, depends on if you want a government capable of affording to pay for public education, roads, military, etc.

I mean if you care about none of these things and want the government completely destroyed, a 50% revenue cut might seem okay to you.
I wonder about that every time I see an ad for Apple Pay or some other payment app. Contactless is rapidly becoming the default, so how do you compete with it?

Apple Pay doesn't really compete with Contactless - they are the same thing! Any merchant that accepts contactless therefore accepts Apple Pay as well, whether they advertise it or not. (Here in the UK, at least)

Apple Pay is a bit more secure because transactions are authenticated with your fingerprint via Touch ID, and the merchant gets a special device card number rather than your real card number. But as far as the payment terminal knows it's just like any regular contactless card.

Whether it's more convenient to take your contactless card out of your pocket/wallet, or use an Apple Pay device is a matter for debate. I find that I usually already have my phone in my hand while standing in a checkout line, so I pay with that rather than fumbling for my card.
There's quite a few solutions to do this, from PDF printers (eg CutePDF) through to alternative office suites (eg LibreOffice supports exporting to PDF).

However by far the easiest for you might just be to use the Microsoft Office addin that allows you to print to PDF[1]

If you need to do this programmatically then you could use the LibreOffice command line tools for converting files[2]

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Print-share-and-pro...

[2] https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/2641/convert-to-comm...
Daniel Kahneman talks about an idea called substitution in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that I think really applies here. Here's the jist: When your brain is faced with doing a task that's going to require a lot of glucose it will look for shortcuts to save you energy. One of those shortcuts is your mind will look for an available heuristic, swap out the energy hungry analysis for the heuristic, and then signal your conscious mind that you did all the analytical hard work.

https://erikreads.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/thinking-fast-...

I think the truth of that matter is, most of us (myself included), don't know how to interview people well. Interviewing is really hard. Rather than doing the hard work by researching the subject and testing ideas, most of us try to imitate successful companies much in the same way the Melanesian cargo cults imitated the construction of airfields and air traffic control towers to lure back that wonderful cargo.

I suspect we like to tell ourselves that we're more analytical because our work can demand rigorous precision. More often than not, I find we developers tend to select heuristics that indirectly test a person on how similar they are to ourselves or people we aspire to be like. Then again, I'm probably making a broad generalization.
Bos Norwich Alex Neil Menegaskan
Ask HN: How much did you save out of your salary in 2015?
Student loans vs. car loans
What is it about not being a lawyer (psychiatrist, economist, whatever) that makes people feel their contributions, though unqualified and generally incorrect, are still valuable? Is there a magical state of not-being that I've never picked up?
Beware the rule-following co-worker
Do you have what it takes to be a good AR/VR Designer?
Yeah last time I did it, it was just a week. And I got my full contract rate (which is about double as you suggest). It went well; got an offer.

Its not usually that hard for a contractor to take the time off; they're on their own time already.
I've seen QR code being read when people access WhatsApp through it's web client. I haven't seen other successful use cases as such.
Hey! I really love Lua. I'd recommend reading Programming in Lua (whatever the latest edition is) and Lua Programming Gems. Unfortunately, Lua is one of those languages that isn't written about a lot because its use case is usually for embedding. You'll have to do some legwork to read how other people write Lua. You probably want to read a lot of code on Github. Olivine Labs springs to mind here as an org that uses Lua quite a bit, but there are more. I got off the Lua train at 5.1, but 5.3 adds a lot of niceties.

Depending on how deep into the rabbit hole you want to go, reading the VM source code is instructive too (it's a pleasant read at ~10kloc. I'd actually recommend reading it on the website as they've hyperlinked much of the code.)
> The mess of terminal windows and text editors that I code in now is frustrating at times.

Just use emacs for everything! It runs in X, it runs in a TTY, it runs everywhere.

My own stack is st[1], tmux & emacs, with Firefox as my browser, within a tiling window manager. I have a single terminal open at any point in time, with tmux multiplexing the sessions. I use C-z as the tmux escape key, because it's easy to type and doesn't do any harm if I accidentally type it outside of tmux. I autostart emacs in server mode from a systemd unit[2] and run it under X.

Sometimes I use emacs's TTY or shell modes. This is something I'd like to explore more. If I did this, I might be able to have one window for both shells and text editing.

Regardless, I have one terminal window to rule them all and one editor window to rule them all. With Firefox tabs, I only need one web-browser window too (although I'm considering using emacs-w3m and/or eww more).

[1] http://st.suckless.org/
[2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon#toc8
"The CueCat was invented by J. Jovan Philyaw, who changed his name to J. Hutton Pulitzer"

This line made opening the wikipedia article more than worthwhile!
That is so insane. $3900 for a 1 bed. (I know it's normal in SF; I'm saying SF is insane.)
I never realized this, but I do this too.

I think the mentality comes from using your bank's website/mint/etc to track your spending. Anything done with a card becomes a specific line item staring you in the face; cash, however, just falls into "miscellaneous".
No mention of Eno's Oblique Strategies [0]? I've found them very useful for prompting me to think in different ways, which often leads to something to write about. I set up a little shell script, `strat`, which prints out a randomly selected strategy. I've also started adding my own strategies and tips and reminders to correct routine personal issues (e.g., shut the fuck up and listen). I used to have them printed out every time my shell started up but that led to me ignoring them; now I have to seek them out and often enjoy the result.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
Freedom to use encryption I think falls squarely under the first amendment, because it's a way of communicating with other people. Freedom of movement has been held to fall under the privileges and immunities clause, which is at least plausible considering that one of the purposes of the constitution was to eliminate interstate barriers to trade.

But privacy? I don't think such a right exists, at least not in its modern formulation. You can't find modern articulations of the idea in contemporaneous works.

And that's a big deal. If you're going to say that a 200-year old document prohibits a democratically-elected Congress and President from setting policy, you better prove that the folks who wrote that document intended that prohibition. Democracy is supposed to be the general rule; Constitutional rights the exception.
Yep, I do. Its a hardware software program. The software is there, its just not working fully.
"There were even a couple of cases where I had really strong internal referrals and the recruiters still didn’t want to talk to me, which I found funny and my friends found frustrating."

This has to be a firing offense.

A recruiter's job is to find people the engineers want to work with and who the engineers believe could be a strong contributor. If the engineers have already found someone they want to interview, and the recruiters are saying no, the recruiters are just blocking the very process they were hired to facilitate.
The Design Challenge Behind Square's New Reader
It could and it would be wrong. But it's not at all what this leak is about.
Just to update you - looks like this has finally been released:

https://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v3.8.3
>But I wasted time interviewing some overqualified people too (because of salary/location expectations that should have been communicated up front).

Well that's your own fault as the job advertiser, and when I say "you", I mean almost all companies that advertise jobs. You almost never state the salaries to be paid, so tons of peoples' time gets wasted by pointless interviewing which gets followed up with insultingly low salary offers.

If you're a cheap-ass and want to pay a pathetic salary, you should state this in your job ad, so that non-deadwood people don't bother to apply to your job.

>This is a hard problem because some institutions write wish lists in their job reqs, and some write hard and fast requirements.

It's not that hard to tell the difference. When the word "required" is used, that sounds like a requirement to me. When a separate list is preceded by "nice to have", "plusses", etc., those are obviously skills that the company would like to have in a candidate, but are not hard-and-fast requirements. If the company is so stupid they can't write a simple job advertisement this way, and they use the word "requirements" or "required" when they really meant "nice to have", then they don't deserve any employees at all.
I am not from the field, but the gamedev scene seems to be full of cases like this.
Is the Windows 10 PDF printer better than the MS Office integration?

Because the MS Office PDF integration is shit, when I get such PDFs in Preview on Mac OS X and then want to print it.
when you're young and you have not done much, nobody is going to pay much (unless you can fool people into thinking you're the next big thing). of course, later we all think it was silly to do that. but was it? i now have an average salary and a home and so many who were considered talented people are still looking for jobs. so what if I volunteered to do some free stuff to get there.
The only other thing I've seen in this space is DodgerCMS. It may meet your needs as it seems to do a lot more than Tumbless already. I think I prefer the way it handles credentials too(saved in local storage iirc rather than in a "hidden" file that's technically available to everyone)

https://github.com/ChrisZieba/dodgercms

Regardless, I think this is something that would be awesome to have. You can even throw in some AWS Lambda if you want to move some stuff out of the browser(like generating thumbnails/index pages/etc). Or just use Lambda to run a complete static site generator(like jekyll or pelican) every time the content in an S3 bucket changes.

Note: I've never actually used either of these, but I did spend a fair amount of time researching this type of stuff.
Scary stuff: Cyber extortion and IT hijacking for ransom
IIRC the entire input polling/NKRO issue can be solved by simply switching from USB2.0 FS (aka USB1.1) to HS, which requires a more powerful keyboard/mouse controller.
Portugal has implemented 4) a couple years ago.
Ah, the tried-and-true roads & bridges argument.

No, I don't believe the government is necessary to do those things.

But if you look at actual government spending, these sorts of infrastructure projects are dwarfed by things like military spending, which could use a reduction.
It was a stereotypes-based joke. It's like pushing a boulder rolling downhill as it passes by. You're not so much using your own power as adding just a little to the destructive power that is already there. In this case, the stereotype is "all Chinese people own a house/condo in Vancouver", which is an abuse of the conditional probability that a property is owned by a Chinese person given that it is in Vancouver (and also clearly impossible, due to there being somewhat fewer than a billion residences in Vancouver). Imputed property ownership is not a derogatory stereotype, so I don't feel particularly bad about perpetuating it.

I was forced to read _To Kill a Mockingbird_. As a result of the forced consumption and interminable in-class literary dissection, I don't have a very high opinion of it, and only a vague recollection of the plot. Nothing could make me hate a book quite like English class.

But that's actual fact of having a national literary canon shoved down our throats, and we're looking at non-factual stereotypes here. As an American, you would have had no chance at all at answering the question, because Americans don't know where anything is outside the borders of the U.S., unless there is a war happening there, and then we can correctly identify the continent it is on about 80% of the time. To the stereotypical American, Vancouver might be barely recognizable as a city somewhere in Washington state, just as Montreal is in Vermont, Toronto is in Ohio, Windsor is a suburb of Detroit, and Ottawa is an illusion maintained by the Canadian military to distract its enemies from the real capital in Toronto.

The movie Canadian Bacon is based almost entirely on this national stereotype, and the Canadian national stereotype.
That generation grew up earnestly believing that a single toke would drive you irrevocably insane, to murder, to rape, to jump from a tenth story window.

Watch "Reefer Madness" - it's reflective of the mindset these policymakers grew up with.

If you want to understand where that mindset ultimately came from, look at the history of cocaine prohibition - it boils down to racial politics.
Kind of off topic but does anyone know which blog platform / theme this is? Looks like Ghost?
Though the body of your comment is a bit snarky, I agree with its substance. I think the programming industry as a whole is in dire need of jointly rebranding ourselves as working professionals (such as doctors or lawyers) rather than the popular "tech guy in the basement who will fix my computer and can code up something real quick if we give him free pizza" image that we are often all too glad to slip into on account of our fondness for playing with technology.

Thinking a bit further on that angle, I wonder if there's a market for a Github-with-payments ("here's a working snapshot of my code -- it's open-source but in order to open an issue that I will look into, you need to pay me $X"). After all, it is the same way doctors or lawyers work – they aren't expected to spend their weekends doing law cases or practicing for free.

[This is part of why I also oppose the widespread "Everyone should learn to code" movements. In principle, I would like to teach people how to code, but I don't necessarily want to do this work for free. Without this nuance being addressed, the "learn to code" movements strongly devalue our industry in my opinion. Have you ever heard lawyers say "Everyone should learn basic civil law" and then offer free classes for the same? It probably happens a bit, but nowhere near the scale that happens for code.]
Any pointers on assessing critical thinking skills during an interview, e.g. with or without technically focused questions?
Mostly I think that peoples support for paying taxes is proportional to the perceived value they receive from them, and how fairly they are being applied (c.f. Denmark vs. USA - and note that "perceived" is important, and subject to manipulation)

I don't know the details, but plausibly could you argue that India's real problem lies in government inefficiency and/or corruption?
It's at least reasonable to cover travel costs for interviewers. I was given a $40/day stipend for food and reimbursed gas and hotel when I interviewed at my current job.
Reminds me of Bill Mensch (PIA,6502,65816) life story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne1ApyqSvm0

he also was very passionate which led to getting screwed by Motorola management, some pointless fake consulting firm, and grand daddy of scammers Jack Tramiel. He worked his whole life for other peoples success :(.
Typescript leans in the direction for increasing strictness one flag at a time in a project, which is particularly fair if you're migrating a legacy project but not always the most sane option for new projects.

In this case, too, there's a maintenance burden in that probably a bunch of type definitions files may need updating before this new strictness is usable in some projects. So there's a direct backward compatibility issue with existing Typescript code that will need to be addressed for this new strictness.

One of the proposals I've seen in the GitHub issues is that Typescript should at least offer a "Maximum Strictness" option that turns on all of the optional strictness checks together, which would be great for fresh projects, with the assumption that new versions of Typescript present some maintenance requirements for those projects. I would love to see that added to Typescript.
Mark my words, now that states see the incredible tax revenues from this industry, they're going to tax the fuck out of it, and then regulate the hell out of it to discourage and limit new businesses popping up all over (which is already happening anyways).

This has become a cash cow for state governments and I don't see this ending well for anybody wanting to use legally. The government track record on stuff like this is absolutely miserable.
That strikes me as a very costly way to build a team. Independent contractors are expensive; they know, better than most other developers, what their time is worth.
You could use a much broader range of donor organs, and not having to worry about matching would vastly increase the number of usable donations.
Of course I care about those things. I simply think that government is not required to provide them.
This is basically how the whole gamedev industry works.

Most positions you'll see pay ~40% less than traditional software engineering jobs and have much longer hours on average.
Rails & Docker are my preference so I did look for alternatives to them. I tried Codeship and Shippable before deciding on CircleCI. I tried Capistrano before deciding on SSHKit + Rake. I went through numerous revisions of circle.yml and docker-compose.production.yml before settling on the ones outlined in the article.
There really isn't a way to avoid this other than only working in places were you already agree 100% with the way they do things. If you build your own company you will also have your way of doing things that you will impose on everyone working for you and you will not change it because of some new guy. Not significantly, anyways.
State of the Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm
New BMW X7 Teased; expected to launch in 2019
Yes, the norm is that the interviewer pays expenses.
Yeah, frequently. Force yourself to write something and get it out there. Applies to programming too: how many times have you put off actually coding a project because you're still tweaking the design? If you're me, too many times. Just write and get something committed -- you can always tweak later. There was just a discussion of this here: if it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262448).

(I still struggle with this, not preaching down at you from a high mountain. Very far from that in fact.)
Uhm, I remember hiring one contractor twice. The first time for $50/hour. The second time for $400/hour. He wanted more, but I was able to talk him down to the same rate as the other contractor. They both worked in crypto.

As for me, after co was acquired, I was a FTE for one day, with great benefits. But, the lawyers wouldn't clarify a claus in the FTE contract that would exempt my IP. Was I assigning it or excluding it? Their answer was "either". Before that, I was working for 4 days per week for the startup and 1 day per week on my own projects (at 4/5ths the pay).

I know plenty of indy developers that are absolutely brilliant. Sometimes they take on side projects as contractors.