skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this is a bit difficult for me to be non-biased because I started working on putting hard drives into the original IBM PC in our gray market shop, and I've been working (or leading engineering teams) that have integrated hard drives for 30 years. However, in my mind, the original IBM PC hard drive wasn't a lot harder than any home builder upgrading his or her PC today.

The original IBM PC had a 63 watt power supply (I hope I'm remembering correct), so you had to take this out and put in a bigger one, but this was simple. Then you open up your hard drive box and put the paddle card in the slot and screwed in the HDD in one of the bays.

You need to know a few CLI commands like fdisk and format c: /s/v, and you had a c: prompt. The problem is that there was no youtube or internet. If you didn't know the few steps, this might as well have been black magic. (Even though most HDD kits did come with some instructions.)

The Quantum guys (a company I later worked for) came up with a novel idea of putting a hard drive on a card, and you could just plug in the card and that was it. This was the peak of simplicity, but carried a premium, so it was a niche product.

By the way, what most people don't realize is that the 3.5" form factor was actually the first portable hard drive. It was designed by Conner for the Compaq portable. Bill Frank was the technology guru at Western Digital, then a silicon maker, that lead the creation of IDE for Conner, the forerunner of SATA.

So it was tricky because of the lack of knowledge, but the actual work was pretty simple.
On my MacBook Air 2013 I still have to convert scanned pdf to djvu in order to read it; otherwise the rendering with poppler is too slow.
I have a somewhat similar experience, except that I’ve concluded that it’s far easier for me to remember a 2d image than physical 3d representation. My hypothesis is that a flat 2d image is just far less information, and doesn’t vary based on the angle I look at it, so it focuses attention. It’s also something I can reinforce by looking at again, even in thumbnail form. I’m not great at remembering faces, but remembering pictures of faces is super easy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve concluded it’s not (very) related to the extra attention required when taking a photo is that I can often remember photos of people that I didn’t take - e.g. their facebook profile photos.
Ask HN: Software scene in Hawaii or Astoria?
Hi HN,

I live in California, and after a crappy divorce, I'd like to get out of dodge.

I've always dreamed of living in Hawaii (I have family on the big island), and Astoria Oregon.

Can anyone tell me if its possible to find employment in these areas? And how one might go about such?
Personal attacks aren't allowed here, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment is. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't. If you'd (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and only post civil, substantive comments, we'd appreciate it. The idea on HN is to have a slightly higher quality level than "internet special".
10% sounds impossibly high to be honest. I would expect something around 0.1%, but I cannot easily find data :(
A bullshit job is one that is either not productive (ie society's output would be the same without it) or that is automatable but hasn't been because of political reasons.

The level education people should have is the one that allows them to become useful problem solvers. Depends on character and domain of problems considered.

I am not saying reaching 100% education will solve a problem. I am saying that before that point, population growth will feed more problem making than problem solving
The fact that cities are doing the same thing with bike sharing belies the idea that they're thinking in economic terms (i.e. that they are actually designing and tailoring the policies based on the economics). In reality, they just want to get a bunch of concessions in a way where the cost residents are paying for those things is not readily apparent.

> The other possibility is a free-for-all, in which companies overbuild (house is serviced by multiple cables from multiple companies) in the densest areas, and the sparse areas get no service at all.

Which is fine. It takes very little competition to outperform a government built or regulated monopoly service in the U.S. Mobile devices are a dynamic market with really just two choices of operating systems, so is ride sharing, search engines, etc. If cities instead made it cheap and easy to hang wire on poles, most urban/suburban areas could probably have at least two choices.

If building service to sparse areas is a concern, the government could step in to do it. What we do now is force providers to build in economically unviable areas in order to get the right to build in economically viable areas. That destroys competition in the economically viable areas by dramatically raising the cost of entering the market. It would be better to just let competition happen where it can, and let the government step in where it needs to.
>say a person bought a pair of shoe, sunglasses and a book. For their newsletter, we will show include shoes, sunglasses and books. This was a lot more relevant than sending random stuff.

I agree with the general sentiment of the article, but this seems like a poor example, since a more sophisticated approach can add a lot of value to a recommendation system. How do you know whether a customer is likely to want more than one item in any of those categories? If they already purchased sunglasses, wouldn't they be more likely to purchase, say, a sunglasses case and/or sunscreen? If they purchased a book, do you recommend the same book again? And if not, how do you choose which book(s) to include?

Of course, you could technically still handle this in SQL with a bunch of CASE statements, but obviously that doesn't scale well across a wide range of products. The whole point of ML/AI in that use case is to scale that type of nontrivial decision making.
What about the DjVu.js extension?

But worst case scenario you could run something like Pale Moon or WaterFox only for accessing such documents.

Also I know how slow institutional entities can be to adapt, but they will catch up eventually.
Here’s more about the project:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/janakiramm...

The Edge security daemon is the portion that is written in Rust.
I visited a friend who had moved to Europe when I was in high school. I was astounded when I learned that German apartments came with no appliances, and if I recall correctly, things like counters were also brought with.

It makes sense if you are planning on living somewhere for a long time, but it blew my mind. In my experience people didn't even move their appliances when they sold their house and moved to a new one.
Multilingual customer support is a problem? According to California law, English is the official language. It seems onerous to require companies to support multiple languages. If they choose to do it for a competitive advantage, that should be their choice. This isn’t a government agency that has a vested interest in serving all citizens, this is a private company.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Please keep this sort of political flamewar off HN, regardless of how annoying another comment is.
Could you please not do flamewars on HN? That commenter was way out of line to attack you based on nationality, and we've banned their account for trolling. But you also posted provocations in this thread, and we need people not to do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The economist Tyler Cowen has the best criticism of Graeber's argument that I've seen:

> Graeber too often confuses “tough jobs in negative- or zero-sum games” with “bullshit jobs.” I view those as two quite distinct categories... He doubts whether Oxford University needs “a dozen-plus” PR specialists. I would be surprised if they can get by with so few. Consider their numerous summer programs, their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit, and the multiple independent schools within Oxford, just for a start. Overall, I fear that Graeber’s managerial intelligence is not up to par, or at the very least he rarely convinces me that he has a superior organizational understanding, compared to people who deal with these problems every day.

Source: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/bu...
I have to imagine the moving truck rental companies must summon nearly every vehicle in the fleet to one city for one day of the year.

This seems so insane. Do the advantages even come close to outweighing the headaches this scheme causes? What happens when July 1 is rainy?
I think the unfortunate reality is as a new grad entering the startup scene it can take a few failures before knowing what to look for. I think I’ve gotten moderately lucky on try 3, but no exits yet.

My only advice is ask as many people as possible what they think of the startup, listen to them and don’t be blinded by big promises.

Also, as previous he threads have pointed out, financially you will be much better if you just go work for a FAANG. If you really want you can use your accredited investor status to buy into other startups.
A scooter isn’t a human right, it’s a luxury. Requiring discounts for low income people is ridiculous. Perhaps San Jose should focus on solving real problems, such as the housing shortages that plague the region.
We've banned this account for egregiously violating the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.

I have placed a ball under one of five cups. You can check only sequentially if the ball is under each cup.

Do you know which cup the ball is under?

If you start turning over the cups one by one, will you be surprised when you find it?

You won’t be surprised after you’ve turned over all but one cup, if you still haven’t found it, since you know the ball is under at least one of them.

You would be surprised if the ball was found under any of the other cups though.

And so there are only 4 days on which you would be surprised. The executioner knocks on Thursday and provides more data than on the prior 3 days.

The judge makes a promise he cannot keep, that no matter what day he schedules the execution that it will be a surprise.

But how can you schedule something for the end of a finite series and still have it be a surprise?

You can’t. So then does it follow if the usable tail of my sequence is marked out of range, what then becomes of the 2nd to last item in the sequence?

This assumes a sequential cascade leads to the state where all possible days have been marked out-of-range.

The simple reality is that the judge can only promise you a surprise Monday thru Thursday. By Thursday at noon the surprise will be spoiled. And there’s a chance that you will sit for a day knowing exactly when you will die.
As Netflix becomes a bigger player around the world and it flexes its influence, I expect to see some international jurisdictions to question its power and imperial projection (projecting its values on countries with different values as well as for threatening the viability of local industries)
I think you have already done a huge amount in the course. You should keep your mind open to the possibility that the students just found the topic of database to be dry inspite of your presentation. It is quite possible that those people would have really hated the subject if the presentation was not as good as it looks.
Ever worked in a megacorp? It's exactly like that. Working at one of the world's most respected companies, I met someone who had been doing the same job for 8 years, the sole responsibility was to create a quarterly report (in PowerPoint) which was the aggregation of a couple hundred other reports. She spent every day copy-pasting from one document into another. Every day, for years. Seemed happy enough. Arrived at 7am, left at 4pm. Earned reasonably well, since she had an MBA from a good school.

When I was a management consultant, the cynical joke was that we stole your watch and told you the time. I learned that, yes, that was my job, but also that most companies are so incompetent that I was providing a useful service.
Gravitational waves and the slow pace of scientific revolutions
All: attacking another user based on their nationality is totally not ok here, and we ban accounts that do it. We've banned this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why would the country demographic matter? Wouldn't it be the customer demographic that matters? Do whites make up a larger relative proportion of the customer base?
Could psychedelics transform mental health?
Things like JBIG2 are a huge improvement over default scanner output for text.

Just be careful that it doesn't silently change the text, because JBIG2 compressors can be lossy that way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238
I wouldn't have believed it either before spending some time in a financial company. One time I was sitting with a colleague who had been there many years and he received an email like a newsletter but with more flashy graphics than the newsletter that already went out on Friday. He immediately groaned and said "that's one more email to ignore then".

And ignore it we did. But someone somewhere decided we needed another newsletter, some team wrote the "news" and some other team designed the shiny new graphics. All just to be ignored and deleted by everyone.

The financial sector is rife with this. It is surely the most inefficient part of the economy. Most things are automated now, yet the number of people employed has actually grown and it's mostly bullshit. There are people who literally spend all day creating what can only be described as entertainment for other people in the same company. I wish everyone could see it first hand.
bitcoin and clones - here is yet another niche opportunity.
We don't "censor views". We do ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and if it's a serial troll, we usually don't bother to say so.
It's been interesting watching the upvote count on this. I was the first upvote, then later on once it had fallen off the first page of /newest it still only had a few upvotes and I assumed it would die. Now after the mod intervention it's been hanging around the second and third page of /news for the last day and to my surprise has 37 points.

Since browsing /newest a lot more in the past few months, I've noticed how a single person can have an outsized impact on the visibility of submissions. The first upvote is really crucial, it seems people tend to notice anything with "2 points" or above and then with only a few more upvotes in quick succession a submission will start to get visiblity on /news. One morning a few weeks ago I cast the first upvotes on two separate submissions, and then later in the day both made it to the front page.
It's the other way around. Rousseau's children were victims of his utter selfishness. His abandonment of his children to almost certain death was roundly condemned by Voltaire who despised him. This caused Rousseau social embarrassment not remorse, which threatened to compromise his livelihood as a parasite on the idle aristocracy. Rousseau attempted to evade Voltaire's condemnation by rationalizing that the fault should not be laid at his door, but that of society: in a perfect society, those infants would have received proper nurture, and Rousseau's actions would not have mattered.
I still think he should've mentioned the peter principle and hierarchiology
Ask HN: Who is hiring?
DaiWare | ML, Backend, Integration, and Full Stack Software Engineers | Baltimore(Onsite), or Anywhere (Remote) | Full Time
DaiWare is a startup building machine learning, and artificial intelligence solutions for addressing chronic care. We are led by a founding team with decades of experience in healthcare, dynamical systems, streaming data-systems, and with experienced clinical and business advisors. Our first product tackles illness that impacts 30-million people and represents a $23B market. We are deployed and are building out our engineering team to scale and harden our real-time platform.
We are developing a state-of-art data systems stack for operationalizing safe, reliable ML and data flows for addressing chronic care needs. This builds on Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Spark, Kafka, Postgres, Redshift, Python, on AWS. We're looking for the following positions, and offer competitive compensation and benefits packages for our stage of growth:
- ML Engineer
- Backend Platform Engineer
- Integration (Forward Deployed) Engineer
- Full Stack Engineer
Your work will immediately impact patient lives in active deployments. Feel free to reach out to me (CEO) directly at tom@daiware.com
That's not just the financial industry. One company I was at built themselves a TV studio to broadcast the occasional C-suite roundtable. Executives love to see themselves in print (and video).
>In general, you will be the one in ten, or even a hundred that tend to pick up on these things.

Being raised by one, dating one, then obsessively reading about personality disorders for a few days after learning about them helps a lot with this.

>It appears to be better to not call them out in public immediately, but build a trusted base of people who compare notes of their interactions, so that you can clearly expose the lies and all that comes with it. At least that is what has worked out in the few cases of really destructive/power hungry of this particular kind of bent I've heard about.

Absolutely. The scary thing is that even this isn't guaranteed to end in your favor.
I was the CTO of kink.com in the mid-2000s.

My biggest challenge of that time was reliable billing. That said, it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. When you have a long history of low chargebacks you can make some deals, and even then there were a few options. We always had a few processors integrated at any one time because 1) any processor could pull the plug on us with minimal notice and 2) these organizations tended to be technologically inept and their platforms were not reliable.

Some payments we processed through our own merchant account. We tried to get more merchant accounts and were unsuccessful. It's difficult because (IIRC) banks only allow a certain percentage of their total volume to be "high risk" and porn is in that bucket no matter how low your chargeback rate is and how long you've been established. It's something you could probably arbitrage profitably if you were a bank, but by the time you get to be a big enough bank you are bound into the stodgy culture of banking ("ewww porn").

That ship has sailed however; there's not much money in porn anymore. The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before, and you can get it free... uploaded to tube sites by the very producers themselves, hoping to get exposure.
Do you even study mathematics? You sound like a programmer with a passing interest in mathematics, because 99% of math books don't worry about issues like the axiom of choice or constructive math. The only ones that do are logic books.
This is why I go to Ottawa to celebrate Canada day and have fun while everyone in Montreal deals with the nightmare
Whatever the reasoning behind these suspensions, I think it's very rude and unprofessional to simply suspend accounts without giving some warnings and some time for a user to comply. Most of these popular online services, including the tech giants, seem to prefer this rude approach. Not having any reliable human support makes the problem worse. Since you can't provide human support, just give some days to comply and then suspend.
So, I just checked his wikipedia page, and was shocked to find out that Cecil Adams is not a real individual person. He's a pseudonym for a rotating collection of ghostwriters, like Franklin W Dixon.
For everything else, there's Bitcoin.
How can a company with a successful product launch a new unrelated one?
I'll admit that calling all constructivists crackpots is unfair, as there are legitimate mathematicians studying homotopy type theory and whatnot that goes way over my head. What I refer to as crackpottery is people who argue that a random proof by contradiction is invalid or who reject things like Cantor's diagonalization argument with no justification besides their personal "intuition" or "philosophy" that math should be constructivist. And I think the latter group vastly outnumbers the former, at least on random internet forums. But I'll apologize if I offend any of those mathematicians with my flippant generalizations.
I've considered the possibility that while seemingly pervasive and inescapable, ad tech is widely ineffective.

There's the perception that it's part of some deep state panopticon, and that there's more than one, and the other one fucked up the 2018 election, or something like that.

But I'd take a wild guess that in reality the effectiveness is something akin to anti-virus software. It only seems to catch the low hanging fruit.

With that in mind, I think this narrative is basing the underlying theme on things that were happening in the early 2000's when Google started buying up companies like Urchin and DoubleClick.

We're way past those days, and while ad tech does still pose a pervasive privacy hazard, I think newer more powerful technologies can passively track pretty much everyone by sniffing all the signals in the air for every wireless and mobile device in everyone's pockets.

I'd wager that the coverage is so dense that it even exposes the identities of people not carrying devices at all, and the facial recognition analysis of security video is just the icing on the cake to confirm exactly that.

So, really, now you have to wonder what the new awful thing is, that our brightest minds are working on.

Probably killbots.

Flying, driving, walking, talking killbots. That's my guess.
Thea idea of "bullshit jobs" is ... bullshit. There's huge amounts of resources poured into eliminating jobs and extracting efficiencies. The idea that there's tons of people out there doing unnecessary work is incredibly misguided.

The root cause of a lot of this thinking is, in my opinion, a vast gap between what people think technology can do, and what it can actually do, in domains that they are unfamiliar with. The technology does not exist today to fully automate even the lowest-skill jobs. For example, even for something as simple as grocery store checkout, the automated solutions are pretty awful. Thus, if you're trying to compete even a little bit on customer service, having human cashiers is still a win. In my own field, legal services, I'd take a high school graduate working minimum wage over any legal technology I've ever seen advertised here on HN.
The problem is that "youtube mathematics" focuses on Hilbert's hotel and Aleph Nought, while actual mathematics as it's taught in unversities barely mention these issues.

Infinity simplifies mathematics _a lot_ in proving things from the basics of calculus (i.e. analysis).
There's just no need for it.

50 years from now, you are not going to have any trouble finding a .PDF viewer, but DjVu is a different question entirely.