skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last time I seriously tried wkhtmltopdf (three or four years ago, at a guess), it produced results entirely unsuitable for printing in quite a few ways:

• It completely mangled the kerning, like it was ignoring the font’s kerning and then making it even worse by only placing characters to 1pt precision (at 600dpi, one dot is 0.12pt). (To clarify: I never actually measured it; this is just my rough guess as to what may have caused it.)

• It was somewhere between agonisingly difficult and impossible to actually get precise sizes; print A4, for example, with your body carefully set up so the widths add to the right amount, and the appropriate “don’t zoom” command line argument, and it’d still mess it up (and subtle content changes could make it better or worse). A container of `width: 15cm` could end up 15cm wide if you were extremely fortunate, but was more likely to be 14cm, or 17cm, or something like that. And it might vary from page to page.

• Pages didn’t really exist, in layout terms, so that any sort of finesse of where things should appear was just impossible.

• Probably worse, you could end up with the descenders of the bottom line of text on a page at the top of the next page. I have a vague feeling I hit a situation where a line could even be split in half, rather than just the descenders, but that may have been printing from Chrome or Firefox at a similar time.

• Its header/footer stuff was mildly limiting and fairly annoying to get working properly (and made document sizing even more troublesome, too).

It was also very crummy for producing a PDF for screen use, as regards things like links and tables of contents and other annotations.

Had it been just one or two of these things, I would probably have filed bugs; but it didn’t look as though there was much interest in actually fixing things, and it was so very broken for any sort of precise, serious work, that I just gave up.

Have things improved for wkhtmltopdf since then? I’d be interested to hear.

I found the state of the art for web-to-PDF conversion to be Prince (https://www.princexml.com/) by an enormous margin, with it producing absolutely superb results. Nonetheless, it does have some limitations; most notably, in my opinion, CSSOM, so that the JavaScript doesn’t interact with the layout at all. There were various other CSS and JavaScript niggles that I hit too, but they’ve steadily been fixed over time too. Bear in mind that Prince is made by a small team and is the entire web engine.

I would really like a vector graphics pipeline for Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/3788
If the approvals issue in all cases where the project clearly is unrelated to the employer's business, then what's the problem? To some degree review of external work is just the sort of thing a corporate legal department is going to push for, and it's not exactly unreasonable provided that approvals issue except where there is clearly a conflict.
My comment on the blog was (at least initially) eaten by the spam filter, so I reproduce it here.

---

JP: There is no way to answer causal questions without snapping out of statistical vocabulary.

AG: We disagree. That’s fine. Science is full of disagreements, and there’s lots of room for progress using different methods.

I'm only an amateur, but from the outside it sure doesn't feel "fine" for the two of you to disagree on what seems like such a fundamental issue. Instead, this seems like a case where two extremely smart individuals should be able to reach an common understanding instead of accepting disagreement as a final outcome.

JP: I have tried to demonstrate it to you in the past several
years, but was not able to get you to solve ONE toy problem
from beginning to end.

AG: For me and many others, one can indeed answer causal questions within statistical vocabulary.

Pearl obviously disagrees that standard statistical vocabulary is sufficient to answer all simple causal questions. You seem to think he's wrong. I think you'd be doing a great service to encourage him to formulate such a "toy" question that he thinks is unanswerable without resorting to the do-calculus, which you then try to answer to the audiences' satisfaction using more standard techniques. Maybe the two of you turn out to be in agreement but using different terminology, maybe you are right that his tools are optional, or maybe he's right that they are essential. Any of these outcomes would feel much more satisfactory and productive than agreement to disagree. Please consider offering him a platform with which to make his case.
What's replacing Jemalloc?
Even if true this would not be a win for open software.
I love these kinds of things so much. It makes the universe feel so massive and vibrant with infinite potential. The sea of stars that make up that galaxy is absolutely staggering.

Suppose you were on an earthlike planet orbiting some star near the center of it. Do you suppose the "night sky" would be about as bright as day due to the number of stars?
Can we stop calling propaganda "fake news"?
I came here to say the author is a good writer. So yea, you have a way of saying saying something complex/deep in an eloquent, even simple way. I've been reading a lot of Raymond Carver lately. You should read some of him if you're keen. I like his WWTAWWTAL collection of short stories.
Might be a sign that we're not in an epistemic bubble, which would be good!
The fact that some are okay with and would use an unreliable tool is not inconsistent with the fact that it is documented that the tool is unreliable. Popularity among users has little to do with the tool being reliable, and this particular one is already popular for being unreliable.
That was the next logical step during the early 2000s. Every bright-eyed college freshman on IRC was "recruiting" for his next awesome MMORPG idea.
> Legit thought I was gonna read something about how they never talked to customers, attended conferences and founder meet ups

I can't tell, are you saying that attending conferences and founders meetups are conventional advice, or that the conventional advice is that they shouldn't be attended?
> How badly would you have to fuck up to be considered a poor imitation of MongoDB?

I literally laughed out loud at this. Thanks for the humor.
I don't know, it's certainly possible. But at least there was the opportunity, as they have upstreamed fixes for other projects. And it's not like keeping the fixes private was hurting anyone (unless they're security fixes; I think modern licenses should require all security bugs at least be reported, in the absence of changesets)
Show HN: Embed and ship static files and assets in Go binaries
I think you just made his point with that list of companies.
It all depends on the product. Once you start getting into niche products which cost thousands or tens of thousands per year to use, the assumption is that the customer is a serious business with funding that has a known problem to solve. There will be a much smaller number of approaches than with a cheap consumer facing product and a conversion is worth a lot, so it makes sense to pair prospective customers with a domain specialist / sales person immediately to tailor the pitch to the specific candidate, modify the solution as necessary to fit the customer's needs, and make sure they are happy.
why? propaganda is kinda hard to spell.
Tokyo is also far more livable place with excellent transit, low crime, clean, with much better food. And hell, I've stayed in hotels in Tokyo (perfectly fine ones, although obviously not 5-star ones) that would cost me less for a month than a crappy rental apartment in SJ.
I agree with you -- if there's a process and it's easy enough to get an approval, I (personally) have no problems.

However, Amazon's game development policy lays out 10ish different requirements you must meet, including not working with others outside of your org, must give up ownership of IP at Amazon's request, must use Amazon services or provide feedback why you couldn't. There's no process by which any of those items can be waived.

This basically means you can't do game jams with friends unless they work in your org. And if your game jam is successful, you run the risk of Amazon just taking ownership.
Your DNS queries are encrypted using TLS. For optimum privacy,use this with eSNI(encrypted server name indicator for TLS).

Cloudlfare's 1.1.1.1 supports it as well which I highly recommend over Google.
Not quite. It’s not the auth mechanism or even the wire protocol. The issue is to accesS traditional resources in a VPC you need to have an IP address within the VPV to route network traffic to/from it. It’d be the same if you ran a DB on and EC2 instance or even ran your own DynamoDB clone with no auth.

AWS services don’t have that issue because they’re accessible from anywhere on the network, even through an internet gateway / internal NAT.
What Was the Highest Price of Ethereum Classic?
Python tutorial designed for machine learning curriculum
Saying DynamoDB is built on top of InnoDB is a pretty big oversimplification of a much more complex distributed system[1] and for all we know they could have switched out the low level the storage engine on the backend to something like RocksDB or WiredTiger.

The Aurora storage subsystem is much more limited in terms of horizontal scalability and performance, they probably chose it because it was a better/quicker fit.

1. https://youtu.be/yvBR71D0nAQ
Well it may not be very satisfying, but Wittgenstein's point is that there isn't anything more to understand about the meaning of words than the ability to use words effectively. http://existentialcomics.com/comic/268
Amazon has a game studio producing games. They've publicly announced Breakaway, New World, and Crucible as three titles.

Why games are different than other areas (e.g. why aren't web services called out separately with their own policy while games are? I'm not sure.)
The format function is going to end up allocating a string for every single byte. That's a huge overhead.

Edit: Turns out to be about 22% overhead, see https://github.com/sharkdp/hexyl/pull/23. Also it was 2 strings per byte, not 1.
I imagine it has to do with Amazon Lumberyard:

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/
Yes it is: https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/sharding/
Yeah, that's not OK. That's not like any policy I've seen anywhere.
This is probably the real motivation, not concern for the wildness of the birds. Neighbors thinking you harbor disease and so on.
This inspired me to look up the Elm docs, and came across this gem:

view model =
div []
[ button [ onClick Decrement ] [ text "-" ]
, div [] [ text (String.fromInt model) ]
, button [ onClick Increment ] [ text "+" ]
]

The html elements themselves are Elm functions. Code looks like data. Nice. Now considering Elm to be potentially useful tool to know.
I’ve found that Elm people don’t like jokes in general.
Ask HN: How would you create the list of the top 100 most influential people?
There are various lists created by various people and organization.

I'm thinking from a data perspective. Some ideas, looking at # of search results? Number of biographies? Number of mentions in other books? Having people vote?
They weren't that careful. It needs to be standard to require "independent" (as far as that is possible) replication of all studies at least once before they are taken seriously. If that means publishing half the current number of original research papers, that is fine.

This simple practice would take care of all sorts of issues (bugs, fraud, bias, random fluctuations).
> Do you trust the software to not have dangerous bugs?

I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.

The problem with software is that you can't look at it to see if it's worn, you can't hear if it's about to fail, and it's not regularly inspected by experts to see how it is behaving. Also as programmers we are aware of hidden bugs that can only show up under certain circumstances. It's only a matter of time until an overflow or off-by-one error kills people.

Car makers and engineers have a very good idea how dangerous certain parts of cars are, and they have been built over many years to mitigate those weaknesses. So you wouldn't expect, for example, the five nuts holding a wheel on to all fail at once.

We programmers know that there can be far less certainty with software.

Even worse, others here have posted about the terrible software practices that were exposed at some manufacturers, and the reluctance by Jeep to react until the ability to crash their cars remotely was exposed at Blackhat.

I think it all comes down to how much trust you have and where that trust lies.

In my hubris, I'm going to have as analog a car as I can, and hold out without as many these features as I can until all the beta software bugs are ironed out. For mechanical failures, it took us many painful years to get to where we are now.

I guess what I'm saying is that I trust myself to pay attention and stay in the lane using the steering wheel more than I trust our current technology not to get confused and kill me by steering wrong. The reward just seems much less than the risk to me for that (and other) features. I don't trust automatic emergency braking to not slam the brakes on at a time when it will kill me either.

What scares me most is the perverse incentives the car manufacturers have to cover up their shortcomings. They have shown exactly how little they can be trusted to be honest with things such as VW cheating on emissions, exploding tires, faulty airbags and many many coverups to avoid recalls, etc, etc.

Also the remote access that is more and more prevalent in cars today. Hackers gaining access to the drivetrain functions of cars remotely is super scary to me. And when that happens, it will happen for every one of those cars on the road.

A DDOS of the morning rush would be very interesting at best. At worst, as bad as any terrorist attack.

Would you trust your life to the stability and security of even a major company's servers? I wouldn't either. There needs to be a LOT of regulation around these things, I believe, and we as a society should be able to decide exactly what we will accept and what we won't.

At the very least there should be rules about exactly how the systems in cars can be networked, and the security around those connections. The jeep hack was through a remote firmware update to the radio unit I believe. There are no important enough reasons to have a remotely-accessible radio directly networked to the drivetrain computer in my opinion.

It can't just be move fast and break things when lives are at stake. Everything I've heard sounds like it's the wild west at the moment.
Not just that, when I was there (2013-2014), you couldn’t even post a line of code on Stack Overflow or participate in any MOOC with coding assignments without prior approval. (The security folks couldn’t do any CTFs either.) I doubt any of their competitors have such extreme policies (except maybe Apple, who knows).
"Ban soft drinks, ban fast food, ban junk food" is trivial for China?

I knew HN is auti-China but this is just ridiculous. I have no idea what country China is in your imagination.
This is not a comment about Europe, but rather America: It is quite normal for there to be several fast food restaurants open either all night or at least until 2 am.

I would very much expect to be able to leave the highway at midnight in most parts of the country and get something to eat.

I've taken exactly one road trip in Europe, and it was during the daytime, so I have no idea if this is common there or not. I do note that you specified "regular restaurant" but GP said "gas, food and lodging", all of which are readily available at midnight in the US.
Where was the outrage when they implemented the MySQL and Postgres interfaces on Aurora?
It's an interesting control scheme to get used to.
I am not sure about the feature discussion on slack. Too much chatter happens in slack and important information can totally get lost. Even in the listed conversation one is asking didn't we discuss about it.

I think the proper place for these sort of brain storming is via a feature request task entry in your project management tool. This helps to properly focus and not lose track of it. I think too much of slack chatter is detrimental to productivity.
The conventional (or what I consider conventional as I see all the YC propaganda) advice is you shouldn't "play founder". There are hundreds of events that can jerk you off and make you feel like a star.

That said, conferences can be productive. There was a good talk during Startup School this year about going to a conference with a 100% booked meeting lineup and walked away with a bunch of deals. As well, peer groups can be very beneficial (that is very much what Startup School is). They might have been poor choices as proxies for "playing founder".
And also increase public trust in what is published (less of the "first they said ... was bad for you, now they say ... is good for you", etc)
I've been skeptical of the news for far longer than this recent "fake news" fad. So to me it is great that people are finally getting skeptical.

Just read the news on any political topic to see they have been getting away with reporting rumors from "unnamed officials" as news for decades, with no one even recording the track record of these anonymous sources. So we have no way to figure out if they are reliable or not.

It reminds me of when wikipedia became a thing and no one trusted it since "anyone could edit it". I was like "you should be skeptical of the regular encyclopedia too."
My understanding is that the most cost effective building height is ~8 stories tall. That's usually the height where wood can still be used and seismic resistance is generally a non-issue. Any higher and steel must be used and the price of the building generally increase exponentially. When that happens, the buildings must be built tall enough so that luxury pricing at the upper floors can offset the increase in building material cost.

Tokyo has many many many mid-height buildings to make density more affordable. The US typically tries to increase density by mixing tall buildings near single story houses which is generally terrible for affordability.
In go toh can't control the polling mechanism if you are using the Builtin types.

You can drop to raw fd's and do whatever you like... of course this negates a lot of the niceties that go affords you.
The Ultimate Guide to Choosing PC Components
No. It is not. The secret to a fulfilling life is to figure out what you like and then do it. A wise man once remarked: "If you are working hard, you are not working at all."
That's...a shockingly pessimistic view of the world's sole superpower.
Sprawling suburbs impose externalities on the planet:
https://inhabitat.com/how-american-urban-sprawl-causes-probl...
Wait, there's a NEW #2?!?!
One of the largest known stars is VY Canis Majoris. It's in the Milky Way and has a diameter of 2 billion km. Triangulum is ~2.7m ly (2.5e19m) away. That's an angular diameter of 2e9/2.5e19 or roughly 1e-10 radians. Imagine a star this size in that galaxy.

A red blood cell has a diameter of ~8e-6m. Pick up a mechanical pencil sitting around you with a .5mm lead in it. Study the tip of that pencil and imagine 60 little red platelets lined up in a row fitting across its width. Now pick up one of those little red blood cells and stick it to a window. Then get in your car and drive 8e-6m/1e-10 or 86km away and look back across the (flat, obviously) Earth to that window. As Triangulum rises over the horizon on the other side of our window, that little red blood cell would fully eclipse our remote twin of VY Canis Majoris.

I don't know if I'm seeing individual stars in that zoomable image, but if I am I don't understand how we make optics that good. (Caveat, Hubble's resolution is rated at ~2.4e-7 radians, so it's likely that those blobs aren't stars, or my math is off somewhere.)
Ooh.. A 3500G, 6c with Vega 15 (or whatever) would be nice!
Am I alone in thinking this, but where did this expectation of cities to be "exciting" apparently for the sake of being "exciting" come from? I've lived in a few cities and I've never seen a difference in "excitement" specifically in Seattle vs. NYC vs. Boston. The only thing that varies is the density and level of affluence.
Surprised to see a search marketing firm using Medium for its blog. Most of the feedback on HN is that you shouldn’t do this. Why do you stick with Medium?
if you just choose an academic lens, you can say number of citations and limit it to certain journals
Besides Chicago, which cities are you referring to?
Same here. We love how replication is built in to CouchDB from the ground up.

I wish MongoDB, which seems to still have more love for it in the world than CouchDB/Cloudant, would have that replication built-in.
>Culturally it is almost completely dead. Art? Music? Dance? Just forget it. In terms of diversity, yeah, no.

> Unless you like living in a culturally dead suburban monoculture, it's not a city I'd recommend to anybody.

What level of Maslow's hierarchy is this because I'm legitimately becoming concerned I'm neither wealthy enough or educated enough to understand or appreciate any of this and it's scaring me.
I think the key point here is that nobody knows precisely what fake news is, so we all create our own often times incompatible definitions. This probably goes back to the source of the word. The terms usage seems to have been organized by mainstream media outlets to attack smaller sites. If that sounds controversial check out the trends on the term [1]. It was a basically nonexistent term, in spite of what it means having been a thing for many years, which then spiked to ubiquity everywhere in a matter of days. That reeks of collusion.

And so does it's demise. The term backfired and began to be used against mainstream sites when they ran articles that were 'factually challenged'. And though 'fake news' has hardly faded, now that the big players have almost entirely stopped using the term - as quickly as they had chosen to start using it in the first place, it's trending back to 0. You even now have articles such as CNN suggesting we "ban the term 'fake news'" [2], a WaPo columnist suggesting, "It’s time to retire the tainted term 'fake news.'", and so on. [3].

The moral of the story being just yet another telling of Frankenstein. 'Fake news' as a term probably did well in focus tests, but once the term was used in the wild it took on a life of its own leading those that created it to desire nothing other than its extermination.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

[2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and-di...

[3] - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-...
Why not? I’ll happily dictate my credit card number into my phone, heck I’ll throw open my apartment window and loudly yell my credit card number into the street, along with the expiration and CVV2, with zero fear that someone or something will actually be listening and recording it / writing it down.

By contrast I refuse to send my credit card number in an email or post it on a non-SSL site.

Guess which way I’ve only ever had my credit card number stolen?
There are those signs.

There's also plenty of advice from wildlife experts not to feed wild animals. The exception being that it's ok to have a garden which contains food providing trees/shrubs/etc.

But people get offended when you tell them to stop doing it - "Oh, it's no harm, it's just a bit of fun".

You get a similar response when you tell people they're assholes for letting their cats roam - despite cats being massive killers of wildlife.