skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Making open source mathematical software easily available on the web
Expenses: Zerox MFD emails scans to mailbox (RFID card scan, no need to manually input email address etc), scans are then attached as email documents from MFD/printer to my inbox. I then attach in ERP expense claim. This is then approved via ERP system by whoever has the cost code I'm seeking approval for, then auto-submitted to finance when approved. It is pretty smooth.

Original stamped documents are filed for 9 years for audit purposes, YMMV on what type of document needs to be stored for what period of time.
Technical debt (like financial debt) DOES NOT slow the delivery down AT FIRST. That is why people incur it! It is pure "GSD" (Getting Shit Done) now, make it clean later.

Financial debt "slows profitability down" later. Technical debt "slows productivity down" later. Both affect company profit. LATER. But arguably increase it NOW.

The analogy is in fact apt.
I will concede some points in your favor for that. I will counter with the fact that almost no CTO will change there deadlines accordingly, which leads to team burnout/turnover.
I know about Receipts, which also can export its data to a few accounting programs. Unfortunately, it's a Mac-only app and I don't own a Mac. If anybody knows something similar for Linux, I'd be very happy.

https://www.receipts-app.com/index.html
Also the smartphone one..EU should investigate on the higher prices, sometimes unjustified, of producers..see Apple, Samsung or LG. This race to and over the €1000 barrier is really nonsense, considering that the companies are profiting
I gave this opening plenary talk at ICMS 2018 on CoCalc, realtime sync, architecture, Jupyter, SageMath, and the business situation... http://icms-conference.org/2018/
wrong comparison. that 1.7mm is also 10x what the founders individual net incomes can be expected to be. 1.7mm is not a lot of money to a SV startup. it’s seed money. they’ll have to offer embarrassingly small salaries to a desperately small (efficient) number of employees so as to spread it as far as possible.
Analytics for Construction Is a Key Component of Success
Let me get this straight:

Person A, a programmer, who writes easy-to-understand code, but takes a bit more time to finish their tasks

Person B, a programmer, who writes dirty code, but takes much less time to finish their tasks

The current non-technical manager will see only one part of the picture and promote Person B. Moreover, Person A might get in trouble, and pressure to “compromise on quality.”

Within a short-term, it is understandable.

Within a long-term, this is a disaster scenario!

So should the “code quality” be part of a performance portfolio of the developer when it gets to promotion time? And how do we get there?
If anyone wants to learn more about the health effects of diesel exhaust, beyond the oft publicized "lung cancer" risk, this is a very detailed lecture on the topic from a guy at WWU.

https://youtu.be/aXEal4YJsOU
Free Stat 110x Course by Joseph Blitzstein
I’ll give my perspective (CTO at a small start-up), and I’ll start by saying that I fully agree with the GP.

Technical debt for us manifests as new cards in the backlog (and/or TODO comments in the code), because when we cut corners we usually have the presence of mind to flag it. I find that as long as these cards don’t rise to the top of the backlog, then it’s safe to ignore them. It means that you can afford to pay the interest of that technical debt.

If however you find yourself repeatedly thinking “To do this feature I really need to fix this issue first”, well then it might be time to repay some of the principal, so to speak.

In practice, the first time we build a new type of feature, we’ll do it quickly and dirtily and accept that it may be throwaway code. If we end up doing the same thing a second or third time, then we’ll refactor. But then we’ll know there’s a need to do it cleanly, and we’ll have two or three examples from which to try to generalize what the architecture should be. On the other hand, we really try to avoid over-engineering and premature optimization. If it’s good enough for Donald Knuth...
I've heard that lots of people have headaches during the weekend (I know there's a difference between regular headaches and migraines though), which is caused by caffeine withdrawal. Some people drink way more coffee during weekdays than they realize, and they don't as much during the weekends, causing the withdrawal.

Maybe that fits a little bit with your experience?
You're buying into a lot of FUD here, there are more high earners in New York and California than many other states and very few have the kinds of problems you're describing.
In NH it varies from town to town. The smaller touristy towns have improved their roads dramatically in the last 10-20 years. Where I live, Epsom, you can tell immediately when you enter either Chichester or Northwood because the highway gets noticeably worse. Not awful, just worse. But overall I'd say NH highways are quite good now.
From the article: "I removed the last names of users because..." and from the TNW critique of the bot "... in the form of a bot that tweets the names and faces of Venmo users...".

I assumed that the available information was first name, avatar picture and the "drug deal". From the sample tweets it looks like first name and the first letter of the last name were given, but no avatars.
>many American ex-cons are required to pay restitution for their incarceration
Hold the phone, people get sent to prison then get to pay for that privilege once released? Do you have any further reading on that?
Much more so! The inventor of the Altair was unhappy when that expansion bus took on a life of its own and became a major industry standard, but by that time he couldn't stop it, and yes, that piece of history rhymed a few years later with the IBM PC. Appropriately, the operating system that ended up being associated with the S-100 bus was CP/M, the precursor of MS-DOS.
I think it's more like a lower bound on difficulty. In other words, halting is one of many guarantees that would need to be checked to ensure that an API didn't break, and it is impossible to check, so it cannot be done, irrelevant of the difficulty of the other problems (like timeouts or whatever).
Fraud alert as in “did you do that? Because we froze your account in the meantime.” To lift the freeze, you have to tell them things.
Warren Buffett I believe works in a similar way - his emails are printed out and he dictates responses. It probably saves quite a lot of time over checking the inbox in the usual way.
Exploring SQL Server 2016 Query Store GUI
What do you do after losing thousands to bad advice? Become a financial adviser
Thanks for the feedback! I am not sure I am understanding this correctly. You should have other colors to choose from (https://imgur.com/J3MCXWo).
Or is this not a color choice issue?
Its a pretty well-trod path by now, isn’t it? Find some API emitting data people wouldn’t necessarily want to see on a web page, write a few lines of code and buy a domain name for it. There’s probably even a HTML/CSS template for it
Ücretsiz Backlink Siteleri Listesi
Spectre rises from the dead to bite Intel in the return stack buffer
It costs a lot more internationally, so I'm not sure how much of a problem it really is. While many people would hate this, the same rule could be applied with "if you're forwarding international connections, you're responsible". Bad interconnects would probably drop immediately with a moderate amount of chaos, while legit foreign partners are found who can filter traffic on their end.
Unless your test suite needs a rewrite, as well…

(Better refactor, of course)
Last year, a spammer spoofed with my business phone number as their caller ID. Mid-day, I start getting phone calls from people yelling at me to stop calling them, stop harassing them. Every 2-3 minutes, someone new and angry. After about 3 hours I had figured out what had happened and got ahold of my carrier and had them change my phone number.
Just an odd observation: in one of the photos, the UniBwM car has a Bundeswehr license plate (Y-320624), yet there's no mention of any military involvement in the article. I'm guessing here, but maybe that was just a trick to get around some regulations that only apply to civilian vehicles?
The primary source of our technical debt is launch impatience.

Specifically, that most stakeholders in a feature or project accept "mostly works, with the exception of rare edge cases" as sufficient cause for launch. This usually takes the form of "get it out the door as-is so we can promote it, and then refactor later".

This is actually somewhat reasonable in terms of balancing business and technical interests, and I can see the case being made for doing it.

The problem, of course, is that "refactor later" never happens because there is always another project or feature demanding to be worked on. These same stakeholders might allow a day or two after launch to refactor, but then promptly decide that starting on Project B takes higher priority than refactoring Project A (which, in their mind, "works").

The above scenario covers at least 95% of our existing technical debt.
More than a few paragraphs in there read like a marketing spiel but some of it might just be an author in the field using terms of art and other verbage that wanders across their desk. Reads naturally to them but totally alien to muggles.
places without snow
Correct. But don't forget that it can also go the other way. The best code writing skills can be defeated by ever changing requirements. Besides code writing there is a also a skill in being disciplined about requirements changes.
Lambda Talk is a language that looks like Lisp, but is based on character string processing. The code is literally the text you see, with the parentheses (braces, actually) and all. Evaluation proceeds by term rewriting using textual substitution.

Similar work:

* James Gosling of Java made something called "Mock Lisp" in the 1980's to support an Emacs editor: Now deleted Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mocklisp

* Lisp in Sed: https://github.com/shinh/sedlisp
> The intention of the fines is not to make money but to discourage illegal behavior.

Of course fines are a revenue source, the EU operates on multiyear fixed budged which they supplement with fines and tariffs.

The bulk of that wealth transfer is reliant on the coffers of US companies.
And were these things to happen to a Venmo user, it's ultimately Venmo that's responsible for it.

(Also: this is work of a random dude that whipped up a Python script in 2 hours, after finding the API link on Twitter. Were the police to care about those tweets, wouldn't they care about those payments before?).

I'm not sure if there is any other reasonable way of handling such problems. If I found this API link and saw this data, I should be able to report it to a government agency, and within a week, Venmo should be under threat of losing shit ton of money if they don't fix it (they should lose some over this anyway). Is there an official process that works like this? Why not?
The UEFI shell is just another regular UEFI binary. If you put it in the place where bootloaders are expected to live, the UEFI ROM should be able to start it like a regular OS.
All these are simply russian puppet quasi-states, so the "embassies" there are no wonder
See also "Chesterton's fence"
I've always associated Asus at the lower end of build quality with laptops that bits start falling off after a few years, cases that just crack and generally wear out from being lightly used. Much like Acer and a world away from HP or Dell, let alone Thinkpad or Macbooks.
That is true.

While I have to agree that it takes the pain and struggle to understand some code out there, it is still worth doing, and a good indicator of the quality of the code, and the fact that it needs improvement.

Also, I believe leaving some “bad code” without understanding it, and just rewriting it, _might be_ unprofessional…
Try this then:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
While nice, the general public is not exposed to the details of what "AI" is and how it's designed. It's that uphill battle against expectations that makes comments like "AI is a bust" or "AI hasn't really advanced since the 60s" difficult to counter.
I agree.

> I didn’t want to actually contribute to the problem of lack of privacy.

This reads more like "I had a funny feeling this could be wrong, but I did it anyways for internet points." How could anything on the internet possibly go viral? I couldn't take what the author said very seriously after this.
Could this tiny spider be helping the Arctic stay cool?
I drove a Range Rover Velar - the interior is one giant touchscreen with additional sub menus, etc. To be honest I did find myself distracted from the road because of this. The worst though is the SatNav popups that will inform you about a better route, changes - or ironically to make sure you are concentrating on the road. All of which require you to use the touchscreen to remove so you can see where you are supposed to be going.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to quote mine. I honestly didn't think that part was relevant to the point I was making.

Neural networks have taken some inspiration from biology, but that doesn't account for the vast bulk of the work. Biology analogies play a much bigger part in popular explanations than they did in the development of the technology.

(edit) Here, for example, take a look at the original paper on perceptrons. Whole lotta math. This having been released during one of the AI flaps, there was also a fair bit of psychology talk. But not much indication that he was just trying to copy a brain and otherwise didn't understand how it works.

https://blogs.umass.edu/brain-wars/files/2016/03/rosenblatt-...

Similar happens with deep learning. They are grounded in theory, most notably a mathematical proof that deep MLPs are, in principle, capable of learning any mathematical function. You just won't see much of that stuff if you aren't actually reading the papers, because most people aren't that interested in vector calculus. Much easier to explain things by analogy.
Thanks for Whaler, looks nice.

I only knew about https://microbadger.com/ until now, but Whaler puts out more info.
31 Flavors of Ontology
> Although I guess the Pango bindings are the ones to blame, as they seem to take ages to be done.

Could you file a bug against Pango? 15 minutes for a build is an extreme outlier.
That's interesting. I never got more than "did you make this transaction?" question, but I could imagine a scammer could start asking more detailed questions.
$2.4M in 8 months doesn't seem a lot. They could have saved their effort by just doing an ICO.
Here's the algorithm used to set the fines: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Honest questions: How do costumers and shopkeepers know the current value of the currency? Do they constantly check on phones/etc to figure out the price? And how do shopkeepers decide on the specific amount they will charge? Do they have a fixed price they want to sell in a more stable currency like USD and convert on the fly?
> I think a lot of the time when a developer shouts “technical debt” what they are really shouting is “code someone else wrote that I’d rather rewrite than understand”

IME it can be one of many things, including but not limited to: was written by someone who is no longer with the company, doesn't have (relatively comprehensive) tests, doesn't have any documentation, commit messages don't explain the codes' reason for being, is a blocker to getting more lucrative features out, nobody understands it ergo nobody dares touch it, written in a language that is hard to recruit new devs for, is working fine now but will be a problem in x months/years time, contains potential WFIO points but is business critical, is difficult to scale, and possibly more.

What i'm saying in the above is that it's possible to write something in a easy to recruit for language, that scales well, is comprehensively tested, has no nasty bugs, but could still be considered technical debt because the original developer(s) wrote useless commit messages, no documentation, and then left the company.
Australian states can collect income tax, and did so. But the High Court found that the Commonwealth could collect tax under the Defence power and that it could essentially crowd out any state collection by being first in line.

The states gave up on the practicalities, but they still have the theoretical power to collect income tax.
Ask HN: Mods: why am I shadow banned?
My comments immediately go to the bottom of the pile and after 2 postings I get "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
Is there anything out there like this for consumer Apple CDs? I'm talking about demo CDs and other retail media that came packaged with Macintosh computers and accessories from the day.

I distinctly remember browsing through an incredible multimedia CD that came packaged with one of the first consumer CDROM drives that Apple put out. In addition to some cheesy video presentations this CD had a bunch of Bloom County comics and some games to boot. I wish I could find my old copy but I think it's been lost to time at this point.
My service provider offers <$0.01/min. calls to many countries.

I have a hunch that no telco wants to entirely block a foreign telco because they would lose money and because of the ensuing chaos.

Robocall friendly service providers intentionally mix robocalls with legitimate traffic to avoid terms of service enforcement. e.g. Robocalls are laundered by splitting across n carriers so spam (identified by bad ASR/ACD stats) stays below each carrier's threshold. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339739
Yes, good code is a lot harder to spot than bad code.
I imagine a significant number of POTS lines are used by robocall/scammer operations, if not directly through third party VOIP services. Make not qualms about it, ATT still treats POTS as it's bread and butter. They will do whatever it takes to keep that cashflow coming in.
I'm on the bank's side of the lawsuit based on what I read in this article. They were covered under "computer and electronic crime" insurance. If the hacks don't fall under that coverage, what would?
ATM withdrawls are already two-factor - unless your ATM experience is very different to mine.

You need the card (something you have, factor 1) and the PIN number (something you know, factor 2).
>As an american, this is one of the most sadistic and reckless ways to raise awareness of a security issue and the researcher should be ashamed.

As an American, you are under educated about how the justice system works.

You can't be charged with crimes they can't prove. It's why comedians and public figures can openly admit to smoking weed.

Putting a weed or needle emoji in your Venmo transaction isn't going to have the DEA breaking down your door in the next hour. These people are 100% completely safe.

With all of that said, if someone is convicted due to this, they were already screwed and being actively monitored.

Also the author said he removed PII.
I think implicits are fine as long as they're used primarily for the typeclass pattern. The extension methods and conversions aspect of implicits should be confined to library DSLs
> could be the result of laziness/unskilled development.

Or not being allowed/kept too busy to fix it.
Yep. I’ve seen this in a number of startups. Didn’t see it as much at big firms.

Reading code is harder than writing code. So, IMO, lazy or slow engineers would rather complain that code should be rewritten than refactored. Or that different frameworks / languages should be used.

Ive entertained them a few times before realizing that it was a waste of time and often things came out worse.
From this point of view, I guess you should make an exception and treat tech debt complaints more seriously when it is coming from the devs who wrote the original code.

Sometimes in order to meet business needs and get things out the door you have to cut corners that you need to go back and take care of later, or you are crippling the future growth and stability of the project. I like your final point "if every change to a bit of code introduces new bugs then that might be a reason to tidy it up".

I think sometimes proper testing is the first thing to go in a time crunch, and good tests improve velocity. If you know that the entire app is being tested automatically, you can develop a lot faster and more fearlessly. Plus writing good tests inherently makes the original code better. You find and fix hidden bugs, and you refactor the code to be more testable which makes it better in other ways.
As I understand it, in Europe to register for a phone number you have to give some identifying info to the telecom so they know who the number is registered with. In the US, however, you can get phone numbers anonymously.
The hifi and AV markets have seemed suspicious in pricing for years. Only way to get a discount is if you bump into an old model somewhere.
What happens is that both states want income tax like you lived in the state for the full year.
Then this is easy, we are discussing the concept infinity, hence it is having a causal influence on our actions and so by your definition it exists.
There were two distinct attacks (probably by the same persons) within an eight month time frame. Each attack took place over the span of a weekend.
Even on cash I rarely put the real purpose in the memo field...

Coming from cash, and finding that the world has apparently settled on venmo, has me supremely disappointed. What the hell were they thinking? Payments is not a social network. I hope venmo feels blowback for this, but I know they won't.

Can any venmo engineers comment on their ridiculous system? Do any users actually find value in sharing their drug deals (and other transactions) with the public?
Blockchaindemo – A visual explanation of the blockchain
Are you talking about sensors or film? Kodak and Fuji dominated film, and today Sony and Canon dominate sensors (Samsung had a pretty solid go of it and simply gave up). Lots of other companies make sensors but they aren’t competitive with Sony.

There are plenty of camera companies, mostly using Sony sensors or Sony fabs.

The lack of manufacturing diversity isn’t a shortage. It’s a different problem. Is there a shortage of cpus?
Meh, I'd wager 80-90% of these are kids/friends joking around. I've definitely gotten "Thanks for the great night" sort of stuff from mates before when I remind them I bought lunch a week ago.

Still don't understand why people ever use the Public setting on Venmo, but that's another story. It's practically the opposite of Instagram, instead of looking like some rich socialite to your crew you look like someone who doesn't carry enough money for takeout.
"Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Instead, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. "https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Totally agree. I've a 50 sheet, dual sided document scanner sitting in a box doing nothing simply because I can't settle on a nice system that silently takes the scanned TIFFs or PDFs, OCRs them, builds a DB and surfaces the whole lot in a web GUI for searching.

There's plenty of Enterprise grade Document indexing systems out there, but they all cost 10x as much as I'm willing to pay.

What I can't find is a FOSS or even cheap commercial software that does all of the above.
You mean a test suite that will take longer to write than the rewrite?
I wasn't making a statement, I was describing the Libertarian point of view, regardless of my own.