skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi HN. I built PDF Otter to solve a headache my last company faced. We needed to fill in PDF contracts repeatedly and there was no service out there that did that, so we had to build something in-house. We couldn't use [hello/docu]sign because sending users there lowered our conversion rates.

The PDF Otter API powers the PDF editor advertised on the homepage. The editor is simple but I think its better than similar services because you don't need to sign up/pay to fill-in and download your PDF. I think there's a lot of potential out there for apps built on the API. Feel free to reach out to me at mariusz [at] pdfotter [dot] com if you have any questions or ideas!
User numbers don't agree with you.
I don't know enough about the culture at Apple, but maybe they're going for a sort of "this is a team effort"? Kinda like the story of JFK asking a janitor at NASA what he does, promoting the answer "I'm putting a man on the moon".

I'm somewhat sceptical that such a policy is better than what's usually practiced, but I can imagine that it may be legitimate under the right circumstances.
Firefox isn't simply aping Chrome, even visually. The next UI refresh is going to look more different, not more similar. https://www.primeinspiration.com/mozilla-firefox-getting-new... The extensions API is being changed to disengage addons from the guts of the browser, which will let the team make bigger changes to CPU- and RAM-hungry areas of the codebase. The new extensions API has had a huge amount of work put into it to expand it before the old-API cutoff around November. The point is to make the browser perform better, not to make it less capable.
It's probably not related to this article per se, but isn't it weird that "x.com" is owned by Elon Musk while the actual company - which is a branch of Alphabet - has to use "x.company"?
"some text-based SQL statements"

What do you have in mind there? Systems that process SQL statements interpret these statements, validate them for correctness against a schema and then provide an auditable plan. Just because SQL bears some resemblance to spoken/written English (a property that vanishes pretty quick when you get past simple use cases) doesn't mean it isn't rigorously analyzed by database systems; SELECT isn't some alternative form of 'grep.'

Perhaps you're thinking of SQL injection attacks that plague that the LAMP stack? If so then you should know that NoSQL isn't immune to injection attacks. Here[1] is an OWASP page on testing for NoSQL injection vulnerabilities; the same sloppy coding patterns that allow attackers to synthesize SQL statements are also manifest in NoSQL applications.

[1] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_NoSQL_injection
It's way more aggressive now. I have also dismissed the convert to 'youtube red' popup like 20 times now and the damn thing keeps coming up on the phone. I never expected my phone to be infested with marketing and ad popups like this :/
They could work around that.

Commitment contracts or the tuition help is forfeit.

They have smart people to figure this out.

They just don't want to. My theory is because Capitalism has gotten way more cutthroat in current times.
No! We've just had so many that our email server has been backed up! It should come soon. Apologies for the delay!
> changing the extensions API to make it less powerful

Changing the extensions API to decouple it from the browser's internals, allowing long-needed refactoring, a move to multiple processes, sandboxing, etc.

And because the old extensions API must be completely scrapped (and ought to have been scrapped years ago), it makes more sense to replace it with a new thing that's compatible with other browsers rather than a new thing that only works with Firefox.
These prompts can vary significantly based on the field you are working on. You should consider a way to customize these prompts that are more relevant to your field.

Overall- very cool concept. Realized this while using it- I have a forcing function of taking only the useful parts of my thoughts forward. That is handy for someone like me that has brain-spills all the time :)
So, for per-minute SIP calls:

Twilio - 0.0125 in 0.017 out

voip.ms - 0.09 in 0.005 out

Of course, the unlimited plan is only useful for a select few - if you want to plug it into your PBX and use it as a small support line (could be this case) or if you're making nightly calls for a few hours to relatives or a significant other, it's quite possibly worth it.

Depends what you're going to use it for and if you want that Twilio API really. If you just want a SIP number, it's pretty clear, but if you want all those nice API features and don't need super high volume, Twilio is probably the way to go.
Sure so why do we have a double standard in the West?
Joe's Own Editor
Using AWS Rekognition with Thumbor
It's role is more to minimize externalities, of which ensuring competition is a part.
Earlier in 2017, Atlassian acquired Trello (MongoDB, Node.js, Redis tech stack) for 425 Million dollars
Some crappy companies such as Eurostar currently experience issues in their website when using Firefox (e.g. impossibility of using vouchers in some cases), and when you contact customer support, they clearly state that "Chrome is recommended" for better results, and that "there are known issues with Firefox". I initially thought it was due to some Firefox add-ons, but even with all of them disabled, things do work better in Chrome.

I've also seen other (somewhat badly-designed) websites where using Chrome leads to less issues, probably because its developers are only testing with it and using non-standard or legacy features/plug-ins. Because of those issues, I am forced to recommend family members to try Chrome when things seem broken, to the point that some have now switched to it by default. I really hope this will not become another IE-like situation...
Facebook in talks with publishers on supporting subscription models
Startups are cheaper to build, but more expensive to grow – here’s why
This does seem reminiscent of some Bond movie: some young company/genius supposedly wants to save the world via a fleet of satellites tracking all sorts of environmental issues, a company called Planet (a logo written in greenery in their office). Then it turns out there's actually a nefarious reason for all this, like total surveillance of everybody etc.
Good/Bad Product Manager
Is there a link to a demo or more information?
In terms of the healtcare; is it free only for native citizens? What if someone were to move there from another country such as the United States?
Not covered in this Guardian article: the somewhat scarier /r/opiaterollcall (recently banned) and /r/cripplingalcoholism (not scary, just a discussion forum).

I have been consuming reddit via the https://www.reddit.com/r/all/gilded/ feed and it is just WILD what kind of weird and worrying stuff is going on.
The idea of "Sexism sells" is probably a concise explanation of why the whole modern SJW (for lack of a better term) thing bothers me despite the fact I agree with what they are saying for the most part.
Help me review my website :)
"Hi, Is there anybody who can help rate my [website](http://amazingmachines.info) or give me any improvement ideas - I have build it myself, so surely not perfect, but I'm keen on optimizing it where I can?

Help me as well through this [survey](https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7S726RJ)!

Much Thanks,
Rey"
> There are a lot of high-quality ORMs out there, that do the heavy lifting, provide type safety, and take care of the boilerplate.

I am a happy user and can recommend the following ORMs:

for Java, Hibernate (a classic)

for C# in .NET, how about... NHibernate?

for Python... SQLAlchemy.

Really good software.
WARNING: they require you to read the manual.
> The install base of this hardware is fairly low as the hardware already barely was usable

AKA the OEMs could get it super cheaply and throw it on entry level netbooks for max profit.

This isn't Microsoft's fault. All the blame is on the OEMs here for using hardware that was known to be at EOL stage.
Expanding OneDrive version history support to all file types
It's often said that the admins simply only shut down a subreddit once its negative publicity is enough to start hurting the website's brand or ad revenue in some way.
An interviewer once told me "You were selected because I liked a joke you put in your resume.", essentially telling me my application was a joke. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.
There was an old flash video game I worked on a long time ago where I did exactly this. I had a boss with two main attacks, and I didn't want it to be super predictable A/B/A/B, so I had it pick between A and B randomly, then reweight the probabilities, so if it picked A, instead of 50% A, 50% B it'd now be 25% A, 75% B. If it picked A again it'd be down to like 12.5% A, 87.5% B. If B then got chosen, it'd flip flop to 75% A, 25% B, etc. The result was it mostly went back and forth between the two, but would do some attacks 2 or 3 times in a row before switching back to the other.

You can actually play it right here and go direct to the Boss Fight if you wanted to: http://briancable.com/clock-legends/
You can take it too far, though. When I listen to Venetian Snares on Spotify, they only play some songs off of 3 albums, despite the fact that have about a dozen albums. If you're going to do that, tell people it's not actually random.
> If data needs to be processed, an option would be to use MongoDB for collecting the data in bulk and later decide how you need to structure it for your needs.

OR, i can open a file stream, serialize my data to JSON, entity by entity, and dump all to a file.

The good old file.
My understanding is that the "internet backbone" market is fairly competitive, as it's not too difficult/costly to install new infastructure across rural land areas if existing network operators are price gouging, etc. Do you think mesh networks combined with consumer hardware could be a viable option to bypass "last mile" ISP/Telco mafia infastructure?
I've been a firm Firefox on Android user for years, but I recently switched to Brave. While Desktop performance is acceptable, Android cold-launch performance is very bad, and Chromium-based browser beat it to the punch. And the native (implemented in C++) adblocking means better performance than uBlock Origin.

Too bad, I really liked Firefox Sync, it was such a superior solution (for privacy, at least).
So it's much like traditional print media, just a lot faster and with fewer filters.
It's interesting how much criticism they're getting because Apple formatted their blog to be anonymous and watered down, but they're clear in their first technical post that it is just an overview of work that the researchers are presenting at CVPR [1].

So the researchers at Apple are still getting credit for their work in the scientific community, but the PR-facing side of their work is anonymous, probably for some aesthetic reason (this is Apple, of course)

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828
> To migrate their first customers without dislocation, they had to hold off on changing the default behavior for longer than they wanted to.

This does seem like a sticky situation, but a potential solution springs to mind. Maybe there's a reason this would have been infeasible, but why not introduce a "MongoDB Legacy" product line which would be a fork with unsafe defaults, secondary to the main product/branch with safer defaults? That way the old customers would have a clear upgrade path every release, just like the customers on the safe product, at the small expense of 10gen having to cut 2 releases each time and mind the diffs around options and defaults. Maybe this would have been more expedient than waiting until version 2.6 of MongoDB?
Well, a little micro mechanical device offsetting the internal balance could work, though the balance change would have to be pretty large to bump the probability of any one face up significantly.
Windows was (is) considered a monopoly despite having a rock-solid competitor in macOS. Monopolies don't necessarily mean absolute control of the market, having the ability to significantly sway it (say 80% marketshare) is also considered a monopoly or at least monopolistic.
Ask HN: Im great at building prototypes, what business should I be in?
Im great at building hardware and software prototypes. Im tired of doing work for clients and I don't want to pursuit the single product > manufacturing - journey. Is there a business type that I can be in, to tinker along and build a profitable business?
Spotify officially says it's not random.
Think about all the lead poisoning.
A couple notes:

1. The opioid crisis is getting a lot of airtime in the media outlets that I read.

3. The opioid crisis is one of the biggest reasons why the Senate's Trumpcare bill is now dead, and was also a major topic of discussion in the weeks leading up to its unexpected loss this week. In short, its drastic cuts to Medicaid would have decimated opioid treatment in some of the states hit hardest, and Senator Capito of West Virginia, at least, would have voted against it because the $40-odd billion dollars that Mitch McConnell would've specifically allocated to opioid treatment would have been a 'drop in the bucket.' Here's some earlier discussion of this point: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/capito-says-opiod-treatment-...

So, all said, maybe find some new sources of news and discussion?

edit: here's a new wire article from the AP that just crossed my RSS reader: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/democrats-trump-action-opi...
So I just got an email back from them and they're going to look into adding it. I really like that tone of interaction, too.
It terrifies me to see this quote from their CTO:

"MongoDB's CTO disagrees with this statement arguing that nearly 90% of database installations today would benefit from being replaced with MongoDB."

I used to attend "office hours" at MongoDB's office where guests ask MongoDB employees for help. Most of my questions involved very complex aggregation queries (that would have been trivial in SQL) that even MongoDB employees could not solve.

While I waited to be helped I would listen to other people ask the same questions over and over and over: "How do I join these two collections? How can I <perform a transaction> and ensure both writes succeed/fail?"

Rather than say "MongoDB doesn't offer this functionality" and maybe advise them that this database isn't what they needed for the specific project, the engineers spent a majority of these office hours explaining they don't need schemas, transactions, relations and advised them how to hack together something that worked.

I don't think MongoDB is appropriate for 90% of the database installations out there. I don't know the number, but it isn't 90%, it isn't a majority, and doubt it's a significant number.

MongoDB really needs to explain what it does exceedingly well versus the other distinct offerings in databases (RDBMS, Key Value stores, MPP/warehouses, HDFS, etc) and market that.

What they do right now is somewhere between disingenuous and down right negligent.

Of course its the responsibility of a company and its staff to choose the right tool for the job, but these postmortems are becoming tiring.
NASA’s New Horizons Team Strikes Gold in Argentina
Pylama – Code Audit Tool for Python and JavaScript
BADA55 sort of has to be understood in context.

There's an academic rivalry between Bernstein and the team behind the Brainpool curves.

Both teams reject fully opaque parameters, for the same reason the authors of this SNFS paper do. But they use different approaches to mitigate the risk.

The Brainpool approach is to start parameter generation from mathematical constants. We assume that the ultimate creator of the universe didn't embed an NSA backdoor in the digits of pi, for instance, so basing a parameter on some permutation of pi is unlikely to result in compromise.

Bernstein's approach is to optimize parameters for size, performance, and security, and to provide a detailed systems rationale for those parameters. The Curve25519 paper is a good example of what that approach looks like.

Bernstein's argument in BADA55 is that the Brainpool approach has a weakness, which is that there are so many different mathematical constants to work from and so many different permutations of them that a backdoor designer still has enough flexibility to find a weakened parameter.

Bernstein's argument is also interesting scientifically. But unlike the SNFS paper, it's not so interesting from a Kremlinology standpoint: it is, let's face it, really unlike that there's a backdoor expressed in the permutation of universal mathematical constants used in any cryptographic standard.

(I'm doing this from memory and may be missing an aspect of that paper).
> as long as the hardware itself is closed source you have to trust the vendor anyway

Because it's an ongoing effort. Years ago people were running GNU software on proprietary kernels/operating systems.

You can't get to fully free and open hardware in one step. Firmware is the next battlefield, and its an area that hardware manufacturers have been winning. The firmware on a modern machine is orders of magnitude larger than it was 10 years ago, while provided essentially the same features. More and more closed source code is running on your machine.

If we don't push back sooner or later your linux install will only be running in a virtualized environment provided by the proprietary OS running in "firmware"
Maybe this is a good time to bring up the European Space Agency film about space debris [1].

[1]. http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/content/view/embedjw/484820
I get this as well, and I think it gets worse the larger the playlist. It really makes me miss itunes' shuffling algorithms.
You definitely can but MongoDB provides convenience over storing and managing JSON files on you filesystem by your own efforts.
I find that EV certs are valued by web marketers and nobody else. It gets written down on a project spec because they read it's "more secure" and the IT team goes through the hoops of providing the very expensive EV cert.

A few years later (upon renewal time), it gets swapped out for a "normal" cert and nobody notices.
Cruise is in San Fransisco and Phoenix right now, so as well known and controlled as driving pretty much anywhere in downtown SF is what we can expect, and that's not easy driving.

Another interesting thing Vogt said on Monday "Looking just at disengagements, if you extrapolate, based on past data, and using our internal metrics, we think we'll actually be in the number 1 spot in 3 to 6 months"

So at last report in December of last year, Waymo's test vehicles had 1 unplanned disengagement every 5000 miles on average, which is impressive, but Cruise thinks they'll be beating that benchmark in very short order.
Schedulers, Kubernetes, and Nomad
> That's "success", not "monopoly". To be the latter you need to show that the big player is preventing the entrance of new competitors to the market.

No, what you're describing is monopoly abuse.
... So? Trello is a great product, and it will continue to be a great product no matter where it chooses to store its data.
Firefox is being squeezed out of the browser market for the same reason Opera was. They have no monster platform/s to leverage.

IE/Edge has Windows.

Chrome has Android and Google services broadly.

Safari has iOS & Mac.

Firefox has... nothing.

Unless Chrome suddenly gets a lot worse, it's pretty clear what's going to happen to Firefox. Even IE/Edge is finding it difficult to hold market share against Chrome on the PC (where Microsoft still has an effective monopoly), Firefox doesn't stand a chance by comparison.
Because of the libraries.

You say you can get matrix libraries for C++. And you're right, you can. But with Fortran, you can get (for example) functions that will solve Hermitian matrices, which run faster than solving regular matrices. Or special routines for sparse matrices, which run faster and use less memory. Or...

And you could write every one of those in C++. But the Fortran ones have 30 years of debugging and optimization on them. They're solid. You can't get that by writing your equivalent in C++.
Do you think Microsoft is obligated to support all hardware for all time?

A line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Great point, although I think the conflation is a little more dangerous. For many users, it's privacy=safety.
Yep, it's a great punchline. :)
House panel approves broad proposal on self-driving cars
Every other kind of environmental damage(as long as it's containable) can be prevented or undone with enough energy, so as long as that's being done all we need to worry about is the energy ROI.

Solar panels, throughout their life cycle, produce much more energy than it is required to produce and recycle them in an environmentally friendly way.
I know this pain. Thanks for a solution that doesn't require multiple hoops for users to jump through!
Do you agree with me that the existing system is not and was not in equilibrium?

If you disagree then this exchange will go nowhere, unless you can convince me otherwise. I think the evidence is overwhelmingly against you.

A current approach to reduce the Ponzi road scheme is to switch to unpaved roads and narrower paved roads. This reduces maintenance cost, though people don't like it because it means they need to go slower. (Which also makes it safer.) It also helps shift the balance between denser housing, vs. the sparse housing available if everyone assume there will be fast transit.

As I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14801413 , other countries have switched away from car dependency. It's not like it's impossible, nor am I proposing a simple "fix" for car use. Removing or reducing mandatory parking requirements is one one aspect of a much larger systematic rethink that we need.

Your comments about resisting "gentrification and upzoning" seem to be about a different topic. I'm all for upzoning, and 'resist gentrification' is a very broad topic including solutions which have nothing to do with city planning.
In my opinion, this is a tactic used when a company has less than maximum confidence in the product and want to test the water. Ie. It could be a great success and they will charge you $$$, or a complete failure and they will drop the product, or a "just ok" success, maybe due to the product itself being "ok". Even then best of these outcomes is not good (considering the risk of investing in the product early), so if they are not confident to charge 100%, I would not invest any significant time/resource into something like this. I'm out.
Does anyone have experience with non-Docker OCI implementations to share? What's an example of something that uses OCI but not Docker? The blog post is a little vague.

I applaud this effort because Docker is sloppy, but I also realize that this isn't usually how technological adoption occurs. Usually the sloppy implementation is standardized, e.g. JavaScript, POSIX, CSV, Markdown, Ruby and Python to some extent -- rather than something designed from scratch or designed with fewer implementation artifacts.

Maybe C++ is an exception, where things are actually standardized and there are multiple, healthy, competing implementations.
There Be Monsters in Working Remotely
The perk companies should be offering employees: Help with housing
replied to the same question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14805812
I have a hard time articulating it, but I feel like what’s happening with /r/the_donald and like minded subreddits is more a reflection of the real world reaching our online communities than the communities rotting by themselves or because of pure admin mismanagement.

Perhaps we thought our little islands of posh culture would stay on their own when reality is taking a dive ?