skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cannot say what has happened/changed lately (meaning the last several years) but besides the test above (which is mainly about Polish antique documents, printed before 1850 and in antiqua and gothic fonts) I needed for work a reliable OCR software (reading "normal" modern documents, almost invariably printed in Arial or New Time Roman) there was simply no match, the difference between the accuracy of Tesseract (very, very low) and Finereader (very high) was very noticeable.

In any case, OCRed documents needed anyway some serious editing/correcting

I also suspect that part of the good (or bad) results might be connected to the language in which the documents are written (Italian in my case) and the "width" of vocabulary used, and to the way the document is structured, in my case ther were often tables that for some reason were easily identified by Finereader and rarely or never by Tesseract.

In any case, I would say (without an actual measurement having been made) that roughly Tesseract was below or around 60% accuracy where Finereader was around 80%, possibly a little bit more.

But even if it was the best one (we tested also other softwares, cannot remember the names) even Finereader was far from being a "set and forget" kind of tool.

I would be curious to know how would you rate the word accuracy of your solution.

Anyway - and only as another data point - it was year 1986 (or possibly 1987) when I had Xerox representatives tell me that "soon" (meaning no more than a few years) the office would have become "paperless".
Presumably you would have to build protections into your own app to prevent that, much like any other user input abuse.
URLs represent and identify content,controling them means you control content. In the short term these changes mean little but in the long term this will benefit google immensely. Google just loves slippery slopes.

Identity and payment are extremely important to any ordered system of social interaction. More than content itself,controlling them helps one control everything else.

I am trying hard to avoid believing conspiracy theoris about Google.

Maybe a legal requirement for intetnet standards compliance makes sense?
Off topic : there seems to be a disconnect between the chrome devs and users. Another instance was the automatic signing in to chrome incident. I've lost trust in the chrome team and have switched to Firefox full time and honestly there's nothing that I miss. The firefox devs seem to better understand their users, frequently blog about changes that positively impact users. I have a lot more faith in firefox even though it's not perfect (mr. robot incident and others).
It ought to be possible to estimate the odds. We don’t know exactly how mortality changes with extreme age but there ought to be a pretty decent idea. How likely is it for a gap like this to appear?
Absolutely, email me at HN username + gmail and I can onboard you :)
One cannot build a reliable system on unreliable software. If you believe you can, there is a lesson in store waiting for you.
How many FTE engineers can this replace? Do you have a case study or whitepaper?
I'm glad to hear you guys put thought into reliability from the start!
You can see similar progression with world record mile runs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile_run_world_record_progress...

Advancements in nutrition and health in combination with expectations about longevity might result in similar clustering followed by leaps.

Or not. Just saying that in the absence of a better fundamental understanding it's difficult to judge the strength of such circumstantial evidence. This recent paper should absolutely make us more skeptical of claims, but doesn't really shed much light on the heart of the matter--limits of longevity.
I have not come across objects in FP - aside from those languages which advertise themselves as hybrid.

clarification: the term 'object' comes up in reference to category theory, but it's meaning may as well be 'anything'. Completely different from the association of data and methods.
Yes but it is also because those specific types of treatments respond well to market forces: they are common enough for there to be a lot of competing providers, and if the price is too high, people can elect not to receive those services.

For a counterexample, look at dental surgery. This is also often not covered by insurance, but it's much more expensive, and low-income individuals often take on debt and risk their financial security to undergo these procedures because the alternative is often a severely degraded quality of life. The difference is that the demand is much less flexible, so providers can get away with higher prices. Many healthcare procedures fall into this category.
Huh, I had no idea it worked like that. That's bizarre.
Yay now their software can see everything on your screen.
A special case, though. Almost all centenarians wouldn't admit of such a solution - at least, until we start getting whole population pedigrees and then an inability to put a centenarian in the appropriate place becomes proof of error/fraud.
I know why you think that is so. But I have already explained elsewhere in this thread why you're wrong. So why don't you look into it a little for yourself.
I wonder what the solution is? Restaurants really should be running their own delivery, but that means hiring more staff which many cannot afford to do in a major city where commercial rents are extraordinary.
The plasma needs to be >=200 million kelvin, the superconductor that contains it doesn't work if its not <=20 kelvin. No wonder this is an engineering nightmare!

I wonder if gradients that extreme exist in nature.
Did you work on it as NoWait or at Yelp (formerly NoWait).

If you worked on it as the original NoWait, have you seen any changes, positive or negative, now that the feature is under Yelp's umbrella?
Go to https://handshake.org/ and click the top link under Developer Airdrop.
If you care for an in-depth back and forth between the IARC and the ESFA, I can recommend this[1] collection of letters between the head of the ESFA and the head of the IARC at the time.
If you are interested in the particular scientific criticisms of the IARC Monograph by the ESFA you can read this amazing letter[2], which is also in the collection mentioned above.

It's in the annex of that document. It's a very good read.

------

[1]: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/press/news/160113

[2]: http://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/EFSA_response_...
Titles are usually chosen by the author, not the publisher.
A lot of health insurance providers are technically non profit, just like a lot of hospitals are. Blue shield is non profit in many states (eg California) as is Kaiser. Chances are, your health insurance provider is a non profit, but still has high “administrative overhead” so it doesn’t mean much to you and me.
I wish Apple would drop their partnership w/ Yelp.
I'm certainly not a fan of the new URI scheme, but it is worth pointing out that Safari has already made the same change. Furthermore I'm not convinced said change is a net-negative for the average consumer.

Safari added the setting "Show full website address", which does just that. I wouldn't have a problem if Chrome followed suit and defaulted to the new scheme, but gave us the option to show the full URI.
The problem with the "insurance" companies is that they're not really insurance companies anymore. As the current top comment by raintrees points out, our so called "insurance" is acting far less as insurance (coverage in the case of a major but unlikely incident), but additionally standard payment for regular healthcare services. And this creates all manner of perverse incentives that messes with the pricing and makes it more expensive for everyone.

Ironically, when I had a bout of un-/under-employment in the 2008-2009 downturn, my only option for medical care was to ration my healthcare services to those actually needed, and pay cash when I actually received service. I paid less per service individually by paying cash (doctors, imaging, and testing clinics, etc, all really like cash, it makes their life much simpler). And overall I paid less by paying only for the services I needed when I needed it, instead of paying into some high monthly payment to have a battery of services I may or may not ever need pre-selectedly available for me.

I think healthcare costs would come down for most if we could get back to something approximating that: medical insurance being actually and only medical insurance -- covering high cost emergencies to prevent such from breaking one financially -- and covering only that. Paying for day-to-day regular medical services can and should be handled differently. In all fairness, I don't know how to get there, and I don't know what the options for the latter would look like, or what they should be. But I do think it would be helpful in the near and long term to put our energies in that direction.
Great read! Tnx for the useful info. I'm planning to start my own business too. The main issue for me is to create a website with a high traffic to attract a targeted audience and increase sales. I found one reliable custom software development company on https://www.effectivesoft.com/ to help me with that task. I heard so many positive reviews about their work.
common networks: https://common.net/
Way too cautious, I think. Because the FBI is not going to ask HN for your IP address on behalf on an insurance company's complaint about somebody lying.
If all it takes to defeat your electronic voting system is changing a SIM card then you haven't designed a very good electronic voting system. There are cryptographic voting schemes that are much harder to defeat than that, and i've already linked them in this thread.
Apple maps relies on Yelp for review information.
Well, with that thing in the background certainly nobody would get focused.
Here's a tutorial on counterfactual regret minimization that does what you're looking for:

http://modelai.gettysburg.edu/2013/cfr/cfr.pdf

I started converting the Java to Python a while back, but got distracted by other work:

https://github.com/RichardKelley/cfr/blob/master/rps.py

That will learn optimal play against a fixed opponent. If you change the code to make both players use regret minimization, it should still converge.
I'll ask the silly question, with all the global warming happening and record ice melting why isn't there more islands being entirely covered by water?

12.5B tons increases the sea level by how much?
Are you saying investors prefer stocks that pay more dividends? That's a different issue. I think there's a misunderstanding here.
Well my point is essentially that unless Saudi Arabia is willing to sell you oil for Bitcoins or that Venezuela wouldn't get 'humanitarian regime changed' for selling oil in Bitcoins, it's all kinda moot.
CafePress Data Breach – 23M Users
We do know this. And we can also choose how we spend our energy on education and outreach. IMO, we should be pushing password managers and 2fa as hard as humanly possible. People can only integrate so much security advice. If I'm providing guidance for a business that wants to improve the security posture of its users, I'd tell them to make 2fa integration as easy as possible and to encourage their users to use password managers before spending time on the particulars of the cryptographic storage of passwords.
Do self driving cars actually record things? As in, store the video? It seems to me they can just process the incoming videostream without storing it, right?
Iteration Really?
I barely get a day or two to do some research on a new piece of work e.g. scope the tooling, mental model, checking how well the third-party components integrate etc before I need to provide an "update" at the status check meeting on "where we are". If you say that you are researching more than once, you are told "if you are facing difficulties, maybe xyz can have a look at it". It makes you feel that you are being labelled as slow/not quick enough and basically comes across almost like a threat of your work being assigned to somebody else who doesn't need to research as much.
Thanks so much for the insights.

> Ottoman Empire didn't dissolved because they chose the wrong side, instead it was huge empire consisting of many nation and spans over an enourmous area (East Europe, Anatolia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, Arabia, North Africa), while the army and many government offices couldn't keep up with the developments of the time.

Not an uncommon pattern.
Kling's Axes of Politics, and the Technocrats
Hi there, at the ESO Fund we can get you liquidity without a full transfer! Feel free to reach out at https://www.esofund.com
I have to say, reading all these replies about the OOM killer makes Linux look quite bad. These proc scores are not an elegant solution. I far prefer Darwin’s launchd which lets you set actual memory limits (soft and hard) that gives you warnings before you cross a threshold. Now this is more consumer OS oriented, but something equivalent for servers that let you express preferences in a more natural way seems desirable.
> Perhaps it would be better to say "based on mathematical functions"

OK, and imperative code is "based on mathematical predicate transformers." My point is that some FP advocates use the "based on mathematics" as some marketing tagline that mostly shows they understand neither mathematics nor FP.

> Sweet! This way my production code can do the same thing as my test code. My job is to know what my code will do. I'll take all the determinism I can get.

That wasn't my point. The expression x ∈ ℕ ∧ x > 10 ∧ x < 12 is perfectly deterministic, but because its components are nondeterministic it cannot be expressed in FP, even though it is very convenient to do so (and commonly done in mathematics).
That's neat, though easily beatable by doing not human-like RPS strats. (Rock x 3, Paper x 3).
One of those silly toxic grievance ideas, that you should only enjoy fiction when the protagonist looks like you, has the same gender and so on.

Do real world PoC even ever obsess over white female dolls with blue eyes? It was just a work of fiction, after all. Do white girls obsess over black dolls? We have a black doll, that my white wife grew up with. I don't think it disturbed her in any way.
Private Insurance pays healthcare providers higher rates than Medicare. Private Insurance rates serve as a subsidy for healthcare providers, allowing them to fund advanced services & facilities while also accepting the lower Medicare rates.

I don't understand how removing this Private Insurance, and then moving everything to Medicare rates, wouldn't instantly reduce the amount of money flowing into the healthcare sector and cause massive slowdowns in all areas, from research, to quality of facilities, to provider pay (nurses, doctors, phlebotomist, hospital janitors), to real estate, and most other sectors of the economy.

It would be great if industry rates were lowered, but many aspects of the economy are relying on rates as they exist presently.

It seems the more optimal route would be to slow the increase of rates, but this seems to be at odds with the process of untangling Private Insurance and implementing a new Medicare for All System.

So my question is, how does Medicare for All cut costs without collapsing the healthcare sector?
Yeah, see https://massmesh.org for Boston.
Counterpoint: I've been all-in on Google Voice since 2014 and for me it's been incredible at an incredible price (free). I use it hours per day for business and personal. Favorite features:

-Seamless international calling and receiving calls while abroad.

-Make/receive calls on multiple devices. I have 2 phones logged in(a flagship and a burner) and use my laptop for most work calls. Press *
to transfer yourself from one device to another.

-SMS from my laptop. Love the option to use a real keyboard for longer conversations.

-Voicemail transcripts, which while never perfect, have been good enough to stop actually listening to my voicemails.

-Being able to use VOIP, but also fall back on POTS when I'm having connectivity issues.

-No more carrier tie-in. I usually have an active sim card, but if I have a few days gap here and there it's no big deal, I just use wifi.
Uber and Lyft finally admit they’re making traffic congestion worse in cities
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren – John Maynard Keynes (1930) [pdf]
> What specific evidence do you have the Reuters has an institutional bias that makes it into the editorial process resulting in a headline?

Trump's tweet references the former Google engineer who claims that Google has an anti-conservative bias.

> The tech community is ...mostly representative of society on the whole.

That is absolutely not true on so many levels. People who work in tech tend to be young, wealthy, live in cities, lean liberal, etc. That's like saying farmers or policemen or doctors tend to be mostly representative of society as a whole. Not true.
In my experience this is not true. I know lots of grunt work that gets done in both paid and open source projects that no one likes, by volunteers with nothing extra to gain. Those mundane tasks are necessary for the larger good, and folks can see past their short term motivations.

Those that respond and raise their hands to do the icky work everyone else tries to avoid seem highly correlated with leadership skills and better communication skills.
As opposed to a driver that may have greater permissions?
Private Prisons Affect Sentencing
> That would go against basically every "traditional American value"

Welcome to the Trump administration.
Don't want to edit my previous comment, but I just realized that you're listing one particular scam that you allege they're not running, while they're running another totally different shitty scam.

This is the equivalent of "why are you mad, I didn't take your wallet" as you're riding off on my bicycle.
I've seen plenty of yelp reviews that look like they came from a competing restaurant, I don't think its any harder to fake reviews since the impetus is on people reporting reviews anyway.
Sudomesh https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh in Oakland
Doesn't Google Inc. predate that?
The programmer has donated their time for free. The code has an MIT license.
I use Daylio for this. It tracks moods that you can configure (and sub-class, so "excited" and "relieved" could be under "good") as well as any activities you add (exercising, coding, watching movies, etc). You can then see your mood over time correlated with what activities you engaged in those days, as well as export it to do some analysis of your own. I just passed a 365 day streak, and it was super interesting to look back and see e.g. how many days I worked, how many days I drank, how many days I played video games, etc., as well as how many days I was happy, sad, anxious, etc
Yelp always says that they don't delete bad reviews for companies that pay them, which I think is true - they just hide the bad reviews behind all sorts of harder to find links so most people won't see them and take them out of the aggregate.
I don't follow - what's the issue with plain old `a` and `img` tags?
My great-grandmother died a month before her 100th birthday. Born in California with valid records and survived her husband by decades. She was pretty active and alert considering her age well into her 90s. We would walk together on the grounds of her retirement home (she needed a walker) until the last year or so.
The Technology of Kindness
Seems like this system would motivate insurers to develop anti aging measures. Good.
The difference is that when this is abandoned, it is complete
> In our study, we focused on the trophic groups of soil micro and mesofauna rather than on their taxonomy.

hum, mumble, mumble... You need some taxonomy to be able to find trophic groups. Nematoda taxonomy in particular can be hard but similar species can be in different trophic levels.

No data available about species of animals or species of weeds in the area when this is basical to understand allelopathy (and allelopathy is basical to explain why some animals could be fleeing the area or be atracted to it).

Strange numbers of predators in some months with relatively low numbers of preys...

I couldn't find also a clear explanation of what is in each trophic group

This elicit more questions than answers to me...
Tutorial: View your bank accounts on the Apple Watch using the bunq API
> Amazon could drive companies within entire product sectors to bankruptcy simply by lowering the price of that product category on Amazon. The problem is that they can afford to do this in a sustainable way because they have so many other product lines.

Selling below cost can be illegal dumping. But do you have any evidence that they're actually doing that, rather than them merely negotiating a better price for it than you and then selling it with thin (rather than negative) margins?

> Then when all major competitors within the item category are out of business, Amazon can increase the price to any amount it wants

Notice that this only works if nobody is willing to reenter the market when the price increases, which is rarely the case. Otherwise they have to maintain the lower prices forever.
“Qutrit” Experiments Are a First in Quantum Teleportation
I didn't quote mine. I literally put in "Japanese Train Attack" and pulled some links off the first page to prove that it isn't quite as perfect as it was claimed. I don't like the fact that the UK is demonised constantly because despite a lot of the problems over here we still do a lot of things right.

Also it doesn't address the very valid point I was making is that until public transport is pleasant and reliable (neither is true in the UK, I dunno about anywhere else and don't claim to) people will not use it if they have an alternative.

No amount of guilting such as the comment I was originally replying to will change that.
I've most definitely timed my job changes to insurance coverage. And luckily in the software industry, insurance tends to kick in on day 1.
> So my question is, how does Medicare for All cut costs without collapsing the healthcare sector?

Administrative and collections costs, which are a large part healthcare industry already (probably more people work in billing than in actually doing the healthcare work). Our current system is a huge mess, mainly related to all the complexity of our insurance system, and just by getting rid of that complexity huge savings can easily be had (though at the expense of a lot of administrative healthcare jobs).

There is a good reason why the USA pays far more than most countries for healthcare received.
The case here is Austria where local privacy laws disallow any use of CCTV/Dashcams unless they only film private property. Exceptions to this require a permit. This in itself independent of GDPR but the same agency is tasked with enforcing it and some of the laws overlap now.
An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at War" by Kenneth M. Pollack

He examines a number of recent wars in the area of interest and discusses some of the common findings he makes. He also finds a number of situations in which armies in the region are effective; it's not just a hit piece.
Voice is a core offering for Enterprise... and all of Google relies on it. It’s not going anywhere.
How Mozilla uses a global team to protect your privacy online
>Isn't this more or less the standard issue "hero's journey" plot template?

I think the comment you've quoted says a lot about how a postmodern society views heroes. Those story themes date back to the Brothers Grimm.
And here in the states there's bans on collecting rainwater on state by state basis, despite the fact that there's good data that it doesn't matter to the macro hydro systems if people collect rainwater.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948194/

In South America it's even crazier. Bolivia was forced to privatize their water system as part of the neoliberal polices they needed to enact in order to get a world bank loan. That new company banned rainwater collection and has used heavily armed paramilitaries to enforce it.