skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some Problems Were Just Not Meant to Be Solved
It's also a matter of younger people being more susceptible to poor management practices and exploitation, e.g. working for "equity" that a more experienced engineer would discount as being no substitute for market-rate salary.

But engineers do it to ourselves too. All the Java guys mocked the COBOL guys for being obsolete old fogies, and now the Java guys are on the receiving end of that, from I dunno Node.js guys, who are going to experience the same themselves in 20 years. We need a culture change so that "legacy" is not seen as a pejorative but a solid, proven foundation on which the organization relies - because this is actually the truth.
I use this tool to reflow PDF papers for an e-book reader: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/
I doubt this means we are hitting the human + tech ceiling. Many runners ran 4:02 miles before Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile. That was a mental ceiling.

I suspect a similar mental issue exists in swimming. The goal you're trying to beat is your own world record or whatever you think is achievable at your current fitness. Other swimmers are aiming for the same goal. Then when swimming, you see the swimmer next to you, and he's swimming as fast as he can, you're pushing each other, the end result just may be that you push each other to the point where you get the same time, and sometimes that will be an Olympic or World Record, and sometimes it won't.
We seem to be of the same opinion? But you don't seem to think something should be done about it, and I do.
As someone who used to x-ray bags of chips I see which had prizes in them - you can screen stuff pretty damn fast for very low cost. You can just image the whole box the stuff is shipped in. However this assumes the contraband has a higher density than chips.
I'll bet the markup was to cover the cost that was charged to have the shop in the first place. I'll bet that the prison shop has a very high rent/lease.
It's usually a bad idea to run email from a home internet connection because it massively increases the chances of your mail being marked as spam. The hardest part of running a mail server is making sure your mail gets through spam filters, and the IP is critical to this.
This question has also been in my head for a while.

I suggest maybe we stop looking for problems to solve and start solving problems we have.

A simple problem that I have right now is ,

I am in need of a high quality technical text book that is in my local language (swahili).

First I can't buy anything from amazon or the other online retailers because I don't have a credit card.

Second, even if I am able to order from amazon I wont be able to get a Swahili version of the book ( Due to a myriad of corporate reasons).

Third, I'm broke I can't afford the dollars that also accompany the shipping costs and the tax that my government has just raised.

So, I sit down and think. Maybe it is about time, we start giving some love to the millions os swahili speakers eager to contribute to the recipes of this big cake called internet.

I find static sites cheap, and elegant. I mix the solution with strong security, and use modern tools to bring speed and relevancy. Many people start to use my platform, a new eco system is born and bam there goes a new amazon, solving a real problem and I'm sure as hell I can afford to pay in my local currency.

The company gets acquired by, guess who? Then you zero the clock and start the whole process again.

From the example above, you can notice, I never looked for a problem to solve but I just solved the problem I had.
That's good advice! But I've been trying to do this and I might be too content with my life cause I can't find these frustrating problems / 'itches'.
They apparently think that those security questions, combined with the password, are the 2FA.

Unfortunately , this is not true. 2FA authentication means something that you know and something that you have. The advantage is the second one: if the attacker has compromised your PC/password wallet, they still can't get into your account because they are missing something (you have).

With UA's approach, an attacker can still successfully hijack the vicitims account if they have a key logger because UA's authentication only requires "something(s) that you know"
You asked a good question. And I hate to say it but that fact has driven a lot of people up the wall and they couldn't grasp how a language could win widespread adoption.
I love this article. I'm very much inspired by what is written here, but for the most part can't find an 'itch' to scratch.

Right now I'm just building stuff I consider is cool / fun and see how it goes from there.
Don't hold your breath; this kind of thing is not new by any means.

Five years ago I published a large collection of public domain documents that had been, before then, locked up behind a high priced paywall by jstor; along with a brief manifesto ( https://github.com/thejeshgn/philosophical_transactions_brow... ) decrying the restriction of important academic work by third party publishers (work which was often publicly funded or is legally in the public domain).

All links to my release or the write up were silently hidden everywhere on facebook, hidden in public feed, hidden in private messages. People who sent them were not informed that their contacts did not receive them.

As a private service Facebook is within their right to behave this way. The only answer is to minimize your reliance on private services to carry your communications. But it seems their billions of users do not understand or care about the control over the lives and, really, minds that they're handing this private corporation. I don't doubt it will change, but it won't happen over night.
Cosmonauts chat on the way to ISS
I get interested in this kind of stuff in an attempt to avoid the "barely working" quagmire, which has it's own problems (namely, ongoing maintenance when it stops working.) Less for reuse - what abstractions will help me avoid bugs? Which abstractions can simplify this and make it faster to write or modify? Which will be easiest to read and thus maintain? It's rare - although not impossible - that the answer to any of these things is "callback hell".

"Reusable" just sounds too similar to "YAGNI violation" to me these days.
When you have an electoral system that basically boils down to choice between two candidates and you get one vote, it's hardly surprising that things end up a mess.
Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android.

Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.
SW-delta: an incremental cache for the web
PDF is a lot easier to handle if you consider it binary output, just like PNG or JPEG. For a lot of developers it makes more sense to use one of the PDF emitting tool chains or libraries available instead of working with the PDF file format directly — the most well-known option being LaTeX of course.
I thought I hated PDFs until I got my first Macbook and discovered Preview and two-finger zoom. Turns out, I just hated Acrobat and zooming with buttons.
By "with names like yours", we agree she means Latinos, right?

Well, no. When I read the article the first time, I presumed she was talking about Black non-Hispanic Americans with Africanized names. Re-reading, I see that this wasn't stated either, but I still read "some defendants" as contrasting rather amplifying the previous use of "a Hispanic defendant". It's possible you are right, but it's far from "pretty obvious".

The Bronx is sufficiently multicultural that I'm sure there are groups I've scarcely heard of who have widely held prejudices against groups that I'd never even guess. I think you, and I, and probably everyone who wasn't in that courtroom are reading things into the account based on our own preconceptions. Racism is one explanation, and likely at least partially present, but I don't think there is any way to know how from this short account how much of a role it plays.

For example, what race do you picture the "racist" judge as? Would it alter your verdict of racism if she herself was Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Jewish? What about the court officers laughing at the "young man" with his pants around his ankles? I don't know, but I wouldn't be startled if both the humiliators and humiliated belt-less defendant were all of African origin, or Spanish speaking, or both.

And what about the "85-pound drug addict who was arrested because she was in a park after hours" or the "pale, slight, and visibly anxious" woman there for a protective order? Is there any reason to presume that judge's lack of sympathy for either of these two was because race? As the old joke goes, does it count as racial prejudice you hate all minorities equally?

So no, it's not "obvious racism", unless we start by assuming that racism is the only reason that one person would mistreat another. I mean, doesn't proof of "racism" at least require showing that the judge treats members of one race better than those of another? Is there any evidence of this in the story? If not, why do we call it "racism" rather than "prejudice", or just "hate"?
I tend to notice lots of inefficiencies at small businesses that I frequent. When the front desk person says they're having computer problems; that's a great time to strike up a conversation and see what they think about the software they use every day and how they think it could be better. If you think you could fix that problem, you're on the right track.
My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?
The linux kernel is GPLv2
I remember Smalltalk and Lisp were pretty slow at the time and required tons of resources to run. Smalltalk and Lisp had better concepts but they fell short in delivering practical result.
Yes, absolutely. I use KDB to get billions-of-transactions-per-second, but then an interpreted language is clearly better than the JVM.

Put grossly, the "technique" isn't well defined; Even things like "message" aren't well defined, and at the end of the day, are we really talking about a new-and-improved memcpy[1]? Or are we talking about something that's less-slow than other things (and if so, what?)

Not saying this isn't interesting, just that I don't know if it's interesting. Something I want to know is when Java programmers struggle to get into 200k/sec HTTP requests, can I point them at this?

[1]: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1110153/Apex-memmove-the...
> who gets to decide that list

The courts, obviously. As the law stands today, you can't sue FB for closing your account for a perceived violation of their ToS (you can maybe sue, but you'll lose); with different laws you could sue, and the matter would be decided by judges.

The fundamental problem is that companies like FB consider user-generated content as a free resource, much like a river onto which they build dams to make money from its flow.

But speech is fundamentally free (and, arguably, public property); the medium it uses to express itself shouldn't get to regulate it.
I use:

curl | python -m json.tool
I don't do intense exercises. Just pushups.

I made a simple rule, I can't touch or untouch my bed without ten push ups.

Ever since I have had a good balance with my exercise and work. I now plan to add another exercise on top of push ups.
PDF1/A is a great standard for printable documents. Because it doesn't try to do anything else.

Regular PDF with embedded flash, quicktime, HTML/XML forms and/or javascript, is a nightmare.
Making a Murderer was great - I assume you have seen the news on the case?
I think Netflix is now probably a major broadcaster. Don't forget their international reach.
I agree with the comments pointing out that PDF was not primarily intended for screen usage. However, it’s quite a good format for typeset text. What if the problem is not really with the format itself, but the way it us used? What if the PDF file was customized to the specific device they will be opened on?

It would probably not be impossible to take EPUB source and then convert to PDF via (La)TeX, with good typograhic settings for the specific device. For my laptop screen the page would be around 28 centimers wide, perhaps set in three or four columns. For my smartphone, one column is enough. With this setup one would not have to scroll up and down while reading the columns, which is the case now when reading e.g. scientific papers. And because of the great quality of the TeX engine it might be easier to achieve a good layout than hacking around with HTML/CSS/Javascript.
security questions as a recovery mechanism are fucking terrible.

most people are going to fill in the same response for their security q/a over multiple sites so pretty much any bad actor in any organization could possibly look at the security q/a, guess that their question/answers are the same on other sites and exploit that avenue.

also fuck remembering all of that.

but i think hsbc was even worse than what united is asking for. for their online banking you had to enter in your password then enter in another password using a browser based keyboard (AVOIDS KEYLOGGING!) and then answer a security question or something like that. i must have asked for a new passcode to reset everything every couple of months (they mail these to you via snail-mail).

of course the problem with the system was (and i forgot exactly how) there was a way sometimes to reset all these systems so you didn't have to remember your answer for each security measure. i was pretty sure it was a bug with the system but fuck if i want to endure the hell in trying to explain to a website with terrible security that you've found a bug in their terrible system and please don't put me in jail and what do you mean, 'what is a hash function?'
Sure, I understand what you're saying about 2FA but:

> They apparently think that those security questions, combined with the password, are the 2FA.

What makes you say that? I see nothing that concretely backs this up.
It was as I recall a timing/time out issue, and very possibly the one you describe, it would just have to not effect the normal keyboard and mouse USB 1.x devices, and I'm pretty sure these USB 1.x sound devices had much better than "a minute or longer" times in resuming.

And, yeah, I can imagine how much of a zoo USB in the real world is....
It depends on the goods. Snickers and Chips really Are luxury items, even on the outside. But if you sold those at the same prices, you'd get in trouble for price gouging. More, maybe 5-10% extra. Security costs are part of running a prison, and should be looked at as such. I'd even argue that having some of this stuff occasionally helps keep morale better.

But hygiene items? Tampons or pads, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, and other such things shouldn't cost any more than they do on the outside. I'd argue that these things, at a basic level should be free and one can pay for higher quality items unless medically necessary. As far as we understand, being clean helps folks stay healthy.
Pdf2txt wasn't helpful?

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...
I completely disagree that Java is well suited for distributed systems.

Several such systems are written in Java solely because Java is very popular generally and is the lingua franca of "enterprise" software development, not because Java is particularly well suited to the distributed systems problem space intrinsically.

Also, Kafka is written in Scala, not Java. Though I don't think Scala is particularly any better suited to the problem either.
Well funded volunteers.

If there's a strong link between the judge and the DA, eventually you will run into a problem with power. This is if you survive the initial onslaught of please of desperate help from desperate people (not all of whom will be paragons of virtue).

At that time, the political pressure brought to bear will be immense.

This reminds me of the recent case where the public defenders office attached the Governor to a case because of the constant budget cuts to their department.
In case it helps anyone unfamiliar with the geography, the Okanagan Desert is the northern tip of the arid region which covers the Eastern half of Washington state; it lies in the rain shadow of the Cascade mountains.
If you are new, I recommend that you pick a discipline with long-term proven value, and go as deep as you can into it. If you have a bit more experience, pick a second discipline, and define yourself as the specialist in X-meets-Y. Just don't be a magpie: make a choice, and stick to it. This is the hard part, because it will be excruciatingly tempting to follow all of the other magpies to the new field when they leave.

As for your other question: no, it isn't just AI. Right now, the "javascript engineer", "mobile developer" and "data scientist" are all magical creatures of the Unicorn Land. I can't predict what comes next, but I can confidently predict that none of these things will be as hot in a decade, because they're all just the latest variations on broader themes.

That said, there are often actual disciplines beneath these trends. For example, "data science" is practically the definition of a magpie fad: science has always depended upon data, so putting "data" in front of the term is an indication of (fairly thoughtless) trend-chasing. But actuaries, analysts, scientists and statisticians have been around for decades, and will continue to exist long after the last 20-something "senior data scientist" has closed his Jupyter notebook for good. Specialize in those things, instead, and call yourself whatever goofy thing you need to say on a resume to get hired.

Any reasonably intelligent kid can pick up a data analysis tool in months, but it still takes decades for that kid to become an expert statistician. Prefer the latter.
> by the Okanagan Desert, a semi-arid region

aren't deserts defined by being arid regions?
>>I wrote that I considered the wave of terror attacks in Germany and France to indicate that a ‘low level Islamist insurgency’ was now taking place in those countries. A few hours after placing this posting, my account was ‘disabled.’

This is very scary for the freedom lovers, humanists and liberals. Mainstream media already practices self-censorship when it comes to discuss the topics related to the vicious ideology of Islam as described in mainstream Islamic scriptures Quran and Hadiths. The social media also following similar practices. It's sad how Facebook is behaving here.

The liberals/critical thinkers have attacked earlier and do attack now also various bad and evil aspects in other religions (Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism) and our free society never suppresses their thoughts. Islam should not be an exception and hence Islam should not be given special treatment. Else we may have to lose the hard earned values that we cherish so much.

I guess, some Islam apologists (whether bought and paid for or not) are hunting down any thoughtful and legitimate criticism of Islam, its prophet Muhammad. They are using various types of pressure tactics for this. For example, labeling any criticism of Islam as racist attacks on Muslims or Islamophobia. Who knows Facebook may have been threatened with some financial consequences by fanatical Islamists (e.g. some Saudis) with deep pockets.

The freedom lovers, liberals and humanists must understand this threat posed by the vicious ideology of mainstream Islam. These views by Bill Maher and Sam Harris may help understand this point in a better way. [1], [2], [3]

The USA and the west now must also invest similar (if not more) efforts and resources to fight this vicious ideology as those that they invested to fight another vicious ideology called communism. We must realize that this is an ideological war and must be fought on the ideological war-front. This can and must be done by supporting liberal minded humanists (like, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins) who are exposing the viciousness of the ideology of Islam and upholding the modern humanist values like freedom of expression and separation of 'mosque and state'.

It should however be noted that there are many people who have been Muslims just by birth and they do not necessarily follow the vicious ideology to its core.

So the fight must be against Islam and not against all Muslims, per se.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E1u9lQeAsY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8rZTuGfZo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46nh8_BK7ok
I don't have any problem with pdf's, and I think they are wonderful, specially for reading books. They almost simulate same experience of reading old fashion book, but in computer !
I like the idea of not being responsive. Because let be honest being responsive would come with so much headache. Every device then render it in a different way.

But I think the problem is software's we use as pdf viewers. Companies tend to ignore pdf's. They think if they can render pdf's , that is enough.No it isn't. Some pdf viewer cant get fit-to-width right.It kind of feels like software companies tend to ignore pdf's.

Apple has done wonderful job with their word lookup functionality . If English is your mother tongue then you don't have fucking idea how helpful is that.

I am PC user , Ask Cortana functionality (in pdf's) in Edge made me ditch Google-Chrome for Edge entirely, and believe me I spend all day in browser 24/7 and my whole life was in chrome before ditching it.
(just imagine how important that simple functionality is for non-English speakers) I don't know how to emphasize it more, but believe me, that simple Lookup (without opening new browser tab and searching for "define $word" is the most functionality most of non-English users want).

p.s. I wish google add pdf word lookup functionality to this :
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...
If you are looking for problems, it's very easy: Do stuff.

Not doing anything you don't know any real problems and can only think about the next photo sharing app.

Working with others on actual customer tasks lets you learn to know the customers situation and problems.
You might want to try out http://bootique.io, it's even better in many aspects
Among others Esther Dyson, Caterina Fake, Christina Brodbeck, Jayne Hillman, Jennifer Lum, Randi Zuckerberg, Rashmi Sinha, Brit Morin, Danielle Morrill, Mari Baker, Cyan Banister, Sophie Amoruso, Diane Greene
Chad – Telegram channel administration tool
It's crazy there is no obvious UI for this. xrandr can do so much more than the typical monitor settings panel.
You cannot judge if Facebook acted in contradiction of their own terms (https://www.facebook.com/terms) when Jonathan Spyers original facebook post is not available for review.
As a moderator of an interreligious group I made rules myself and often I get the accusation of unfair censorship. Some censorship can be just and some censorship rules do not inhibit free speech (for example using bad language).
Yeah maybe I was a bit too enthusiastic, but it's a dramatic improvement compared to before.
I don't like PDFs but you can sign them with certificates. This makes them great for busness contracts.
No way that you can understand how safe is the neural network that is driving your car.
And this applies equally to open source autopilot systems and closed ones.
The article is just a rant that misses this fundamental point.
Which at least builds on the belief that courts should work as courts. Not mock trials where guilt is pre-supposed and you end up tossing people you don't like away.

The idea of a quick sentence without a fair trial is abhorrent and kryptonite to the functioning an actual robust society,