skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I briefly looked at running Javascript inside PDF a couple of years ago - I think this is possible under the spec, but no major renderers allow it.

Could be wrong.
You’re talking just about casinos while ignoring, for some reason, lotteries and scratch cards. Framing this as regulatory or political capture is laughable when prior to the internet taking off, state and national lotteries were the most common form of gambling in America.[1] After the internet became the go-to... guess what lotteries are still far and away the top.[2] In fact lotteries being in more revenue than all Indian and commercial casinos combined.

This isn’t about organized crime, it’s not even about private enterprise. This is about taking money from people who predominantly cannot afford it, in the context of shitty educations and stagnant wages. It’s not about “Vinny” breaking legs, it’s Uncle Sam. I’d add that “Harm reduction” is fine in the context parties who don’t directly profit from the harm, and in the context of readily available and high quality treatment.

Getting out and around and learning about the world at large is good, but in the absence of a strong foundation of knowledge about your own “corner” it’s just empty puffery trying to sound worldly.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/3769/lotteries-most-popular-for...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling_in_the_United_State...
What Charles Bukowski’s Glamorous Displays of Alcoholism Left Out
We get almost 500,000 uniques a month, mostly unmonetized (though that's changing, slowly). I would LOVE to integrate an enterprise tracker but the pricing is just absurd. I mean, there's no way we can even 'try' it. We grew alot faster in organic traffic than we expected.

It's definitely meant for large enterprises, not for growing ones.
if you want to fly anything other than a small plain you’re doing it wrong. think about it! we could get a new pilot and have them fly this in no time. it’s simple and can do this 2 tricks really well. everything is fluff and not for professional pilots. and google flies a couple of them so how could it be wrong?
Your argument hinges upon the notion that separated grades increases incidence of car-bike collision per capita. I concede that if that that core fact is true, you're correct — separate grades would be worse from a public health standpoint.

So, do you have evidence for that central claim, or is it just speculation?
Weird how everyone you disagree with you tag as crazy

If their disagreement comes in the form of de-platforming, evidence-free defamatory tarring, and violence, then yes, I would say they're in this "crazy" category. This certainly fits

all concerns about murders are folded into 'there will always be lone crazies' as if their motives were inscrutable

Do ideologies cause crazies, or do crazies latch onto ideologies? If it's the former, then we should be more concerned about the Far Left variant! (See below)

You sure have an odd set of priorities.

Only if you weight things by mainstream media coverage and history going back 3 decades. However, if you look at what's actually happening in the past few years, there were twice as many killings by Far Left extremists as Far Right extremists in the US, along with several hundreds of incidents of Far Left political violence. Of course, I'm much more concerned about the extremism which is more frequently violent which is somehow getting a free pass with the US media. Should I be more concerned about a lone crazy who was caught and who everyone already knows to be bad, or more concerned about legions of violent crazies (many of whom march openly with semi-auto rifles) who seem to be getting a free pass and propaganda work done on their behalf?
Depends entirely on management priorities. I make sure to never take a job that judges me on butt-in-seat or mean-time-to-email-response. That way I can build skills that actually matter and take that to my next role whether it be at my own startup, in mgmt at bigco, or as a consultant.
Foul Balls Are the Pace-of-Play Problem Nobody’s Talking About
It is actually about fairness.

Commerce is a fundamental fact of life and for many projects an opensource approach just doesn't work, this a lot of people have to opt for closed source for business reason, but the very same people would like to leverage libraries and "open software". I do. And this is why everything I publish publicly is under a permissive license.
I don't think I necessarily agree. While having one person who has complete control and effectively focuses a business to the correct decisions and technical goals is super effective, part of that effectiveness is getting the rest of the business on the same mindset as you and giving employees room to add their technical nous to the work.

The criticism leveled (which I do not actually any insight to the truth of) is that essentially people have to follow his "whims" and are micromanaged, which does not bring out the best of employees and can be very stifling.

But that said, I don't know the truth of that criticism.
Yes, it hasn't been updated because dependencies have to be updated first. See recent discussion on updating ghc: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/48899#comment:43.
Show HN: Icotar – Generate Free Colorful Icon Avatars
I did a week-long silent meditation retreat in Thailand a few years ago. I thought it would be difficult for the same reasons you mention -- I tend towards night-owling and loathe the thought of not eating for more than a few hours. It turned out to be much much easier than I expected. Without electronics and other sources of artificial light the circadian rhythm shifts to the sunrise-sunset cycle pretty rapidly. I slept quite well for the majority of my stay. As to the food, I think we're just conditioned to think we need way more than we really do. Eating two meals was only hard the first full day, and after that it felt fine. The meals were on the large side so it wasn't a large calorie deficit, if any. I definitely encourage you to try it if it's something you're interested in, you may be surprised at what you're capable of.

e: in light of what jason_slack said - your experience may vary, of course. Just saying that personally I did not find the sleeping/eating situation to be too difficult after a couple of days. My biggest struggle was actually sitting on the ground for so many hours per day. My hips and legs have become so tight from chronically sitting in an office chair that maintaining good posture on the floor was very painful for me (I've actually since started stretching regularly to work on this).
That's nice, but business necessity is, by law, an affirmative defense to discrimination claims, including those based on disparate impact. Whether the defense succeeds or fails depends on the facts of the case and a court's interpretation thereof.

It's literally part of the Griggs v. Duke Power Co decision from which the disparate impact standard arose. The 1991 Civil Rights Act puts on defendants the burden of
proving "that the challenged practice is job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity".
I know, it's a really crappy situation all around. I went and spent a few hours trying to see how to prevent fingerprinting and the answer is you basically can't. That sucks.
If you google “Newton” Google attributes it to Issac Newton on the side bar, seems like it must be wrongly attributed unfortunately. Thanks for correction.
Ask HN: Are Smart Speakers the Next Smartphone?
What do all of you think about smart speakers and their rapid growth and infiltration of the American home? Do you think there's untapped potential for smart speaker apps? What apps have been most successful so far?
A lot of the reasoning behind these kinds of shock-related systems is exactly as you describe, to shift you out of your previous modes of function and directly into a new mode.

The participants of the group (meditation retreat, army boot camp, etc) are all 'reset' into this new mode simultaneously and together, increasing group coherence.

The point is not to be comfortable, the point is to spend all one's time and mental energy doing the new thing, whatever that may be. I suspect most folks are extremely shaken for the first two to four days and then settle into the new routine.
How is it impressive because of age?
I had thought the NYTimes was above that internet troll behavior. Clearly I was mistaken.

Well, that's one less place I'll be spending my money online.
Unionization doesn't have to be inherently bad. It is possible for well disciplined unions to be an overall positive force for both sides of the coin. Sure, there are plenty of negative aspects to unions but there's also a lot of negative aspects to having limited bargaining power. I personally believe growing rampant abuses in this industry is starting to warrant it.
If you're going to sleep that early, I don't understand what the problem is with that schedule? For example, if you made everything 3 hours later, that would be breakfast at 9AM, dinner at 7PM and lights out at midnight. That's still 9 hours of sleep... it's probably a bit early compared to the average coder schedule, but waking up around sunrise doesn't seem all that strange (compared to waking up hours after the sun is up).

Is there no lunch maybe?
Tangential question, but are there any efforts to treat shell scripts as a compilation target? It seems like such an insane language, I don't know why another nicer language hasn't emerged on top of it.
It's an 8-fold way. http://www.zenguide.com/principles/eight_fold_path.cfm

"It avoids the extreme of self-torture that weakens one's intellect and the extreme of self-indulgence that retards spiritual progress."

Hard to sit on a 2-legged chair.
Hot Tech Markets, 2019 [slides]
All of the similar Buddhist retreats I have looked in to (though I've never attended) required interviews before even a 3 day retreat, never-mind 10, and generally wouldn't allow you to do a long one before having done a short one.\

You can read many similar stories about retreat experiences which are less extreme. It's just irresponsible to put yourself through that extreme or let someone put themselves through it without proper preparation. Especially if they have a history of problems.
We’re on a custom plan and pay them quite a bit every month. However after their acquisition, their support is basically non-existent in responses.

We’re migrating to in-house Jenkins now. Can’t trust third parties to handle critical infra.

I was a big pusher for Travis, but they’ve lost my trust.

I would advice everyone else to migrate off and mitigate their risk.
I had the opportunity to hear Van give a talk of his at OSCON last year. His talks are very interesting (he is a former sofware developer, now a patent attorney) and if anyone sees him on a conference schedule, I really encourage them to go have a listen.
I think AWS would still rather do what they did with DocumentDB.
Reasonable accommodation doesn't mean the day off and it certainly doesn't mean the day off without requesting it in advance.

To be clear, I'm not defending Yelp requiring people to be on email/phone 24/7, but his statement makes it very clear that he never made a request for this.

Should he have to? No it's a weekend. But legally they aren't required to. Had he requested, in advance, that he not be contacted on Sunday for religious observation you can bet that would absolutely be public. It'd be a slam dunk case.

So yes, it is perfectly legal to email someone on a religious holiday and expect an answer if they didn't request accommodations ahead of time. There's no court in the country that wouldn't call that unreasonable.
John Wayne’s Notorious 1971 Playboy Interview: “I Believe in White Supremacy”
Does not matter any more. Just wrap it in a container, and put a grpc api on it (I.e. create a microservice). My preference is go, mainly due to the vast amount of open source libraries
Can you name any that do this? Why would they? A podcast app should be basically free to run so why introduce the cost of downloading every podcast?
Lack of sleep, sudden change of routine, total immersion in a new mindset, and withholding food is the classic playbook of cult indoctrination. The point is to weaken existing barriers that would otherwise keep people aloof, disengaged, and instead create a total experience. I’m not claiming that a meditation retreat is a cult indoctrination, at least not most of the time. It does however share some commonalities with indoctrination, and interrogation. If your goal is radical change, a breakthrough emotional or otherwise, this is an ancient and proven system to make it happen.

Boot camp has some things in common, because it is quite the indoctrination, but they feed you well, and focus more on breaking down the ego and forming a group identity and esprit de corps. Cults focus on breaking people mentally and creating dependence. Interrogation tends to focus on disorientation and a need to bond with the interrogator. Meditation retreats focus on breaking existing habits and perspectives and instilling new ones.

Similar tracks, different intentions and outcomes. Another difference is that in the military you’re screened for prexisting psychological issues, and they have a vested interest in that screening process. You also have trained observers at all stages who know to look for signs of deterioration. In a retreat you have no screening, no such resources, and no training in recognizing early signs of psychosis.
Self-hosting your analytics is probably the better way to go. There's Piwik (name has changed to Matomo at some point) and I noticed Countly also has an open-source version your can host yourself. There's a lot of functionality in analytics software and you should not throw it all away and roll your own simplistic thing when you can just take a quality open-source product and host it yourself.

But I agree that applications have unique things about them and for those, people need to implement their own metrics to measure whatever interests them. In that case, the current best choices for time-series database are InfluxDB and Prometheus. They provide very simple APIs and tools for collecting and transmitting metrics, and if you prefer to store aggregations of your metrics instead of the many individual data points, you can use the very simple but powerful StatsD api/client/library/package.

Shameless plug: My company HostedMetrics (https://HostedMetrics.com) offers hosted and fully managed InfluxDB and Prometheus. It includes everything needed for a turnkey metrics platform that is ready to accept your metrics the moment you create an account: StatsD for data transmission, Grafana for dashboards, and the alerting functionalities of InfluxDB/Prometheus.
It's been about a year or so since I've flown, but from memory there were tablets on my last QANTAS flight that also had run of the mill hardware cameras on the tablets. They looked like any ol' chinese made tablet to be honest, I didn't think too much of it.
If you think about it, the people going on 10 day meditation retreats are probably not the most relaxed people in the world. The author was struggling with a lot of issues...

Also, if you don't believe in God, you get hit with a conundrum at some point: Why do so many people say they have had religious experiences, or talked to God, or near death experiences, etc? Are they lying, or is something happening in the brain?

There is a lot to be said that the human mind may have never evolved to live in a complex society like we live in with billions of other people in it. There seems to be a lot of loose wires in there.
Hey Omri,
This is pretty cool! So let's say, I'm using QuickBooks, then from the workflow perspective, do I switch to creating bills in Routable or I still create them in QuickBooks and then open Routable to make payments, and Routable creates bill payments records in QuickBooks?
Willing buyer, willing seller. You could probably buy a mansion in these countries with $500k. Someone else in the same country would take it. I'm personally happy just making enough money to be in top 10% by 30 years old, so others working remotely in the same time zone have to compete with that.

However if you're unique in a vertical, you no longer compete. Let's say you're no longer just an app developer, you're an expert in live streaming videos and CA/DRM for apps. Maybe there are regional/legal difficulties in implementing this.

Now suddenly you are worth a whole lot. A company like Netflix is willing to pay premiums like $100k for a consultant for a week maybe.

If it's a large enough niche, demand exceeds supply, and people are willing to pay closer to what they're valued.
I feel the same. Everybody should get the same benefits independently of religion.
I liked a ANKOS, especially the chapter about physics.
I don't think they were at all saying it's not important, but rather trying to encourage, to reassure that 'breaking into a cold sweat' isn't necessary.

Also, from what I've heard, Chinese is rather an extreme outlier among languages in terms of difficulty in westerners being understood, isn't it? Everything about it's different. (It works the other way too: by far the worst, opaque, near-indecipherable English-speaking I've experienced online text-chatting with people was by a couple of Chinese people..who told me they were English teachers! I could hardly believe it..)
The way you say it is like you're saying that Documentation should be second class, not just that it is anyway. Keep in mind that the software in this particular case, is software used mostly for the API, so the Documentation is front and centre.
> there is no denying that it's the quicker and cheaper method

Yes there is. One of the primary motiations some companies have for forcing abitration is to make claims that would usually be covered by class actions prohibitively expensive to pursue. Recently that has backfired for Uber with 12,500 individual actions being filed against them [0].

Also, when arbitrators actual go ahead and do things properly with discovery and all, the costs can be greater than court because instead of the taxpayers paying for the judge the parties in the suit do, e.g. [1].

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-uber/forced-int...

[1] https://www.employmentclassactionreport.com/flsa/eleventh-ci...
They also don’t respect Sunday. In the US it’s normal that all stores are open on Sundays and holidays.
>What incentive is there for corporations [...] to invest in its own people

Where does this obligation come from, especially considering most large corporations are multinational?

>The idea that a nation of 350 million people can't supply the workers needed for the US economy is nonsense.

For some jobs, a pulse is all you need. High Tech jobs are much more demanding. The US isn't producing enough engineers, this is well known. Even in universities, more than 50% of enrolled students are foreign born in STEM fields, see: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
Not only that, but those hours put your hourly rate around $20. Which is about what you would make as an assistant manager at a retail store in the Bay Area.
I had previously tried setting up some sort of Apple Script or folder action to do this in macOS for someone. The other day I noticed they added a, "Remove items from the Trash after 30 days" in macOS Sierra.
Never had a problem in US, but had few nightmares in Spain and Germany. 30 mins "detentions" for extra screening.
> The fog surrounding economic projections, and the other uses and abuses of statistical evidence in politics, might lift at least a little.

The perpetual historical failure of academic economic modelers is a counterexample to this line of thinking; to think non-academically trained folks would fare better is laughable
Let's not confuse proprietary software, open-source software and free (as in freedom) software.
The fact the author had a history of drug abuse and mental health problems, probably didn't help things any.
Doesn't the ability to trivially iterate on the entire software stack running the device allay those concerns?

If a good chunk of the GNOME/free software community ends up with a librem5 in their pockets I think userspace progress should be pretty well covered.
A Heavily Commented Linux Kernel Source Code [pdf]
you can’t trust the browser client at all, but setting that aside it isn’t very reliable, much better to queue up commands and then do real work on server (what happens when some third party service is down?)
I think it's still open-source, it's just not free (as in freedom) software. I'm annoyed how suddenly redis, even when source is available, is put into the same bin as say MSSQL, with rest of the "proprietary software".
Some pretty cool things:

- He's a CEO who dogfoods his own software! Not only that, he seems to be one of its most prolific users. That's amazing.

Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever.

- He's a remote CEO, and supports remote working! It sounds like the company was ahead of the curve in this respect.

- He's grown his company to 800 employees over 28 years, and it's still relevant today. And I believe he never took funding. Also amazing! Most tech companies that are 28 years old have gone through a ton of turmoil.

I've heard all the bad stories about Wolfram's personality. Combined with NKOS, that made me think poorly of him.

But maybe has mellowed with old age. People forget how insufferable Bill Gates was 20 years ago too. Gates really rehabilitated his image and maybe Wolfram will too. Despite the ego, he's definitely contributed interesting things to society. And I hope that I'm as excited by my work as he is when getting to that age.
Its easier said than done though. We started following this few years back but then while it was "few lines away" originally, code evolved and now there are parts where its 20+ lines away. This means that short var names need to be continuously "enlarged". Well, then why not start with a "medium" name and avoid all that headache? ctx is a good enough compromise between c and context. (c can be client, config, context, certificate ... you get the point).
This is partially the purpose of army basic training. If you can’t take the stress of boot camp, it’s good to know that before you’re faced with the stress of combat.
Since ℚ(φ) = ℚ(√5), an alternative implementation is to use numbers of the form a + b√5, where a and b are rationals. This can be a nice stepping stone, since people are more familiar with manipulating square roots than they are with symbols which happen to obey an equation. It's also a nice exercise to try to match up these two implementations of the same number field.