skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Being able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses

I once worked for an insurance brokerage whose in-house CRM had started years before as an effort to automate paper-based forms. The company's business model was based on having their sales advisers fill out insurance policy application forms on their customers' behalf and originally this had been done using pen-and paper, which was obviously time-consuming and laborious.

At some point, someone in the IT department had had the idea of scanning the application forms to image files and writing a simple PHP application to insert those images onto web pages with HTML <input> tags superimposed over the form fields, thus allowing advisers to fill in the forms using keyboard entry.

They quickly realised that once forms are filled in digitally, (a) you can store the form data into the database and retrieve it later for further editing, (b) some of the data can be filled in automatically from the customer's records and (c) when generating quotes across multiple insurance providers, the common parts of each insurer's form can be filled in from data previously entered elsewhere.

While the idea of superimposing HTML input fields over a scanned paper form isn't one I've encountered before or since, that company was turning over $3M per month by the time I joined, so there is clearly mileage in the idea.

Incidentally, it turns out that basing your entry forms around scanned paper forms completely kills dead any of the interminable bikeshedding that takes place around UX design with complicated, multi-section forms.
the startup compiles itself
Show HN: Pixaven – modern GPU-powered image processing API
Hello HN! My name is Przemek Matylla and today I am launching Pixaven - modern GPU-powered image processing platform [1]. This product represents almost two years of work and countless hours spent in the datacenter.

Pixaven is an image processing API that runs entirely on Mac Pros (cylindrical, 2nd gen) that we host ourselves in a Tier-3 data center in Frankfurt, Germany. The goal was to build a service that would enable developers to process huge amounts of images at blazing speed with a simple to use API. Since pixels nowadays belong to graphic cards all heavy processing takes place on the GPUs [1].

We wrote our image rendering engine from scratch and can rapidly deploy custom solutions that revolve around pixel manipulation, computer vision and machine learning.

Pixaven API currently supports:

- Resizing and scaling (with multiple modes)
- Cropping (with multiple modes)
- Face detection
- Watermarking
- Masking
- Filtering (such as blurring, colour isolation, duotone, etc.)
- Manual adjustments (such as brightness, contrast, exposure, etc.)
- Automatic enhancements
- External storage to AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM, DO and Rackspace

While Pixaven works like a standard API and can push processed images to object storage of choice, we also offer Storage and Delivery addon and can distribute visual content over a global 65+ Tbps content delivery network.

Developers can integrate the API right away with production-ready integration libraries for Node, Go, PHP, Java, Ruby and Python.

We also implemented some additional features around the Pixaven Account such as 2FA and SSO, team management, access control and detailed activity logs.

We'd love to get some feedback and I'm here to answer any questions

[1]: https://www.pixaven.com/about
Usually any post about python is about how shitty the language is and how one can't write anything larger than hello world in dynamically typed language. This one in wholesome, I like it.
The fact that basic medicine (insulin) is just left to be provided by the not-really-free market is very telling.

And this is strictly a problem of lack of imagination, political will and compromise.

But that's just the symptoms of a deeper festering problem, namely that of increasing political polarization.
Naive question, but don't we have to get all the parts and supplies up there in the first place?
This sounds shockingly close to my own dad, except he's still working (albeit in a much, much less technical role), which makes me suspect that it is the age...
I am adjusted my scope for only project management and its roles, kinda of like niching my responsibilities away from those other roles you have mentioned. It allowed me to enjoy my work a great deal more and I am learning as well.

I have found the book "The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change" by Camille Fournier thought provoking for me.
Yeh this whole thing seems like Germans are just unhappy with every solution, but I have a feeling it's media engine that decides this and not actual Germans.
Why would it die. Most of the internet is a rehash of MS access.
This is definitely interesting, and it is completely possible that in some situations other manufacturers might have the upper hand.

They did test it on autopilot though, right? It says "standard" on Model 3. AFAIK autopilot features are not standard, it's an option you have to buy on Tesla. I also can't find anywhere in the report whether the car was actually driving on autopilot or not. All of these details I think make a big difference. A standard non-autopilot-equipped model 3 might just be subpar to other cars, it would not surprise me.
for people downvoting, the great "schooling of society" started in the 1940s-50s:
https://ourworldindata.org/literacy

till then most people around the world didn't know how to read and write.

my own eastern european country had an illiteracy rate of 95% in 1920.
"$100/month, unlimited users"

Just a not that, to me at least, that kind of pricing seems a bit unrealistic - a lot of CRM products charge that per user per month and do very well.

NB I'm not implying that you can't serve that demand - just that to anyone familiar with existing CRM products that seems bizarrely inexpensive.
> Does physics care whether the workings of the universe are accessible to our logic?

the universe itself doesn't care, but physics, that is, our math based theories, certainly they do, in fact they require it.
"He was firing a gun at cops!" seems like such a lame defence to me. This is the US we're talking about, where someone can unload an assault rifle inside a school or a church and render the entire nation powerless, lest the issue be politicised. You don't see the cops rolling a tank through the school cafeteria to try and smoke the gunman out. Just imagining that is utterly absurd!

But this though... oh no.

A single guy with a pistol, in an area they could have evacuated, who would have inevitably tired himself out after standing off for the best part of a day, daring to face off against the almighty police force? Nah, you gotta go full Michael Bay on that shit. Bring out the armoured cars, explosives, tear gas...

There's literally no rational justification for this. The actual soldiers out in the middle east know better restraint than to go nuclear at the first chance. And they're dealing with people packing a lot more heat than this guy with his belts and a pistol.
> Any kind of injection of dependencies should be done via an explicit method/constructor parameter.

I would go further and always recommend manual DI - that is passing the objects and creating them in code rather than depending on some magic framework to do the job. That makes understanding / analyzing / fixing bugs a lot easier.
https://mayvaneday.art/ by the way
Even Firefox dropped it's built-in RSS support by now, so for the current September generation, this is meaningless, unfortunately. Still, as infrastructure, it's very important, because it's simple to transform RSS into other formats: JSON feed, h-feed[^1], etc.

As for how to "follow" (I'd prefer to use subscribe instead) a personal site these days, it's a hard problem, reasonably well documented here: https://indieweb.org/follow

There is a current effort, called microsub[^2] to tackle the problem, but it's new, and is not user friendly enough at all.

Alternatively you can make your site compatible with services like https://fed.brid.gy/ and people on fediverse[^3] instances will be able to follow it.

Trouble with these: all of them require some (ranging from install wordpress plugins to write your own service) technical knowledge, and therefore contributions to solving them and making them more accessible, are more, than welcome.

[^1]: http://www.unmung.com/

[^2]: https://indieweb.org/Microsub

[^3]: https://fediverse.network/
Uber Money and the Fintech-Ification of Everything
Intel hits 10nm goals and signals a shift away from traditional CPUs
Congrats on the launch! I briefly skimmed through the docs and the product (at least from the outside) looks very polished. I'm curious if you guys are using any other hardware except of Macs?
I like dependency injection as an assemble mechanism in OOP languages like java, so that I just don't have to go around with "news" everywhere constructing every thing I need.

I don't like having to use mocks and stubs, and I think that using those everywhere is indeed an anti-pattern.

Having interfaces for stuff that won't really have polymorphism, it's just there for DI or because some guy likes interfaces is just wrong IMO. Interfaces is a layer of misdirection, if you don't have a use for it, don't use it. If eventually a use comes, then you put an interface there, with modern IDEs, there's even short-cuts to extract an interface from a class and do the renamings if you want. So please don't make "interfaces by default" that some DI apologists seem to love.
Not the point; typing the quoted text in duckduckgo gave me the url. The problem that what makes the web a web is glue between the components: the links. Without that, there's no web or net.
Big data workflow scheduling with Airflow and orchestration tools (Docker Swarm)
This might just be my experience, but I've found Quora to be of extremely poor quality questions/answers with a few outliers. Reddit on the other hand seems to have both good answers and people just horsing around, but not as much astro-turfing as I find on Quora answers.
You will need a recursive name for it :-)
> Any kind of injection of dependencies should be done via an explicit method/constructor parameter.

I would go further and always recommend manual DI - that is passing the objects and creating them in code rather than depending on some magic framework to do the job. That makes understanding / analyzing / fixing bugs a lot easier.

It's actually not that hard / boilerplate-y to do even in Java (which is what we do in our team).
> So not only are facts capable of telling a narrative, but it gets much more complicated once you start introducing conclusions.

"start introducing conclusions".

So not just stating facts after all?
> but even stating facts can be extremely manipulative

Another thing is the choice of facts you decide to state. All media have a bias in what type of news they decide to cover. Usually they pick stories based on what their audience wants to hear. I don't think there's a solution, besides trying to be more critical about medias in general.
I would also like to add that I do love Spring's new functional bean definition for kotlin, keeps my kotlin stuff cleaner, and it's easier to replace if I get fed-up.
Dubious. On a desktop device it's really common for there to be mechanisms that make it easy for software to steal the clipboard contents and intercept keypresses because these are things that some legitimate desktop software needs. There may often be a documented API that even a mediocre programmer can use to get this working in a few hours.

On the other hand, stealing session tokens is typically going to require reaching inside the browser process, which is perhaps the most sophisticated software on a machine, and then groping around to find these tokens. It definitely is possible in some cases but it's likely to be pretty hard.

I'd compare it to the difference between stealing a person's credit card from a bag they left under their seat versus reaching under somebody's shirt to take the money they've tucked into their bra. I don't doubt that somebody, somewhere, is good enough to get away with that second one unnoticed, but I know for sure the first one is easier.
Reading through the article's comments there's one from "LegalBeagle" that criticizes the man's lawyer for using the wrong argument in the lawsuit, and instead should've filed the lawsuit as a violation of the 5th Amendment.

Luckily he must've gotten a better lawyer, because an appeal was allowed to continue under grounds the DEA violated the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment:

> Because plaintiffs have stated facts sufficient to demonstrate that the government physically deprived them of property for the duration of the controlled drug delivery operation, we hold that plaintiffs have stated a claim for a taking compensable under the Fifth Amendment. We therefore deny defendant’s motion to dismiss pursuant to Rules 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6).

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4467728/patty-v-united...
You’ll understand when I say this: our lab was part of AIMD, so we were governed by NAVAIR instructions. Sked was for shipboard maintenance, but we technically weren’t performing “shipboard” maintenance so we didn’t use it.
It sounds like in the title they're using the literal definition of office, rather than your broader "office and those who occupy it" definition.
Yes sure, we are also running an array of Supermicro machines for load-balancing, DBs and storage pods. It was a huge upfront investment but now we keep the costs of running Pixaven very low.
Foie gras does not come from geese who are merely "fattened up". It comes from geese who have been made intentionally sick to make their liver swell up to several times it's normal (healthy) size.

There is such a thing a thing as more natural "animal friendly" foie gras which apparently takes advantage of geese's natural instinct to gorge themselves before migration, which results in a slightly enlarged liver, but still much smaller than the traditional foie gras. I've never been able to find any in a restaurant, though, so I just avoid foie gras and the restaurants that serve it.
> the company intends to continue making its heaviest bets in areas such as [...] 5G modems [...]

This looks confusing at first glance since Intel reportedly sold off its 5G modem business to Apple. Turns out they sold the mobile device-specific to Apple but still plan to double down on the infrastructure parts.
Deepfakes AI Dubbing
> This is such blatant and obvious nonsense.

Calm down. This isn’t productive to discussion.

> that have been built into your system, you have ended up with a nation where the most powerful person

For being the most powerful person, he doesn’t get much done and is in the process of potentially being impeached. Sounds like an argument in favor of the checks and balances and an argument in favor of less power being concentrated at the federal level in general.

> publicly broken all the norms and all the rules

Publicly broken “all the rules”, really? Methinks you’ve been drinking some koolaid.

> Wouldn't it be great if you would have a powerful centralized body that can say "Ehm, you guys keep on telling outrageous lies

Absolutely not. A ministry of truth that dictates what people say and answers only to politicians is about the worst and least imaginative solution to the problem.

> What you don't seem to take into account in your comment is that centralized bodies can protect the weak from the powerful. If you only have decentralized entities, it's survival of the fittest

False dichotomy. State-level governments in the US are very capable of handling many of the responsibilities that have amassed at the federal level.

If you think more centralization is better, why not have a single world government that decides what is true? The government choosing what is true is working pretty well for China, why don’t we just let them take over control?
The police aren't interested in investigating low-value cases. However, with a suspect in sight they'll go after them even if it's low-value.
a) it's easier to lift many smaller parts than to lift one big rocket b) we might start mining raw materials on asteroids or Luna.
I have tried to use some of these theorem proving systems . Since Coq is pretty popular (which means lots of documentation and examples ) I would try that
I've been hacking together a Webpack setup so I can include small Vue apps in a Django app instead of making it an SPA. Will Vue cli help me with that?
Fun idea, could work if combined with a dumb phone, or an apple watch. The only problem is you know they will eventually fill the book with ads...
If we were to distribute the costs across different parties, how could we do it, and who could be included in this distribution?

- The suspect
- Mr Lech (owner of damaged property)
- Mr Lech's insurance
- The police department / other involved agencies / city
- The store from which the belt was stolen
- Insurance for the store from which the belt was stolen
- Individual police officers or superiors who made a call for an excessive reaction

I am sure this is not an exhaustive list, but expands it to more than Mr. Lech vs. the police.

As a mental exercise, let's sort this list by who should be responsible, using whatever metric. When I do it, Mr. Lech comes out on the bottom, regardless of what I use as the criteria. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone can come up with a way where Mr. Lech would be at the top of such a list.
> Surely thought has progressed in the last two hundred years?

Nope, that’s not how it works. People consistently keep retrying ideas for government and economics over and over because they get tempted by promises while ignoring history because “this time it’s different”.
So is Google Big Brother?
The big difference between Twitter and FB/IG is that it's explicitly oriented towards following people you don't know, not your friends. There's great, meaningful stuff on there (amongst all the meaningless fluff, but that's just Sturgeon's Law). The political stuff is toxic but if you dodge that and follow interesting people it gets a lot better.

The 280-char limit is IMO a bug these days, not a feature, and people route around it somewhat awkwardly with threads.

(Some random examples of good stuff:
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1189378755313242112
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1189249817492557826
https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/1189604908074332160
)
yeah no excuse for not running it through a spellchecker, thanks
The problem with this argument in general is that there might always be unintended consequences for any change. Hence one should never try to change anything.

In this case, the argument about rising taxes seems completely arbitrary. Why couldn’t I likewise argue that they would actually be lower (e.g., by closing loopholes)?
I really liked this essay -- I found it very clearly explained and it pointed out something I ought to have known but somehow had never previously realized.

My only complaint is that when I went to go read through the other articles on your blog and perhaps add it to my RSS feed there weren't any other articles! This wasn't the first thing you have written... is there a place I can read some of the others?
Loooong time reader and first time poster.

Everything you mentioned (aside from the business card reading) can be done with Odoo and the CRM addon. You can set up email aliases for different teams which allow you to cc or bcc correspondence directly to Odoo and have it match with existing contacts (or create new ones if need be)

The community edition is FOSS, easily extendable and can be self hosted. Only requires some extra Python packages and Postgres.

Full disclosure: My employer runs Odoo for MRP, CRM, Sales and Purchasing and I am employed to develop and modify these addons. It’s mostly Python and XML/Qweb for the front end but it’s a great platform to develop for.
What defences do plants use in this case? Article describes why but not what.
Every president has lied; they have reasons to do it. Maybe it's to avoid revealing classified information, or to gain a political or geopolitics advantage. It doesn't matter; lying is an essential part of statecraft.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-history-of-lies-on...

Edit: I would appreciate if whoever is downvoting can please explain why they are doing so.
People that have sexual trauma are trivially easy to trigger with large shows of political power or 'abuse' around sex. It worked on me when I was younger. The only solution is to get your sex life in order and some of the people engaged in that debate are doing just that.
Surely this is too lightweight to perform in windy conditions?
Then let me define it more precisely: Ads usually are not the content a user requested or wanted to see when accessing a particular media outlet.

In a way, well-designed ads are similar to a well-designed checkout process in that respect: I can admire its beauty or simplicity but I wouldn’t visit a website solely because of it.
> Could being attacked on twitter by the president for something you say not be construed as a very real retaliation by the administration and thus a curtailment of free speech?

No, someone talking to you in a public forum, even in a hostile fashion, is not a curtailment of free speech. It’s just free speech.

Free speech isn’t the right to not have your feelings hurt.

If Trump attacking people worked on Twitter, there wouldn’t be any democrats left in office at this point.
0.5% puts in context that if a small drop in facebook usage would make the political ads a net negative. Just 1% of users dropping facebook in protest, or a small percentage of users reducing their usage because of fatigue from politica adverts would make political adverts not worth the cost. The tiny share of revenue for political ads is going to jeopardise the massive majority of revenue.

The real underlying issue we need to address is that it's nothing to do with revenue. Facebook has a political position that nothing may be out of bounds for facebook. Facebook must be everywhere, everything must be on facebook and that must be acheived at all costs. It's an obviously morally repugnant position, but nonetheless, it's not being challenged.
Growing up as a Mormon kid and seeing these DVDs around, I was always curious why it was legal, and none of the adults I asked had an answer, or even seemed to understand why it wouldn't be. It's funny to discover this article >10 years later and learn that the answer was "it's not."
Farmers sue German government over climate change failures
Congrats on a front page :)
It's two different things indeed.
Still, I do have a problem if it is the religious sect censoring but I do not if it is a company offering that service to the religious, and customers choose to use it, but not because a religious leader said so.
This is because religious leaders have too much power, easily becomes cultish, I'm really afraid of religions that are just ways to make money, I think it's unethical, and because religion can be like a drug, if you add censorship into the mix, it's too dangerous.
Basically, don't put censorship into the hands of powerful entities, being it facebook, or religious leaders.

As a disclaimer, I'm a Christian, with a catholic upbringing. I like religions, I think it's an important part of human life, it's just that they can be very dangerous as well.
My Blogging Stack in 2020
Start with the one with the best documentation. It's hard to beat Software Foundations: https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/, which happens to be for Coq.

If you search the web for "Software Foundations in X", you will find partial ports of some of the initial chapters to pretty much any other proof assistant. Maybe nowadays they are full, complete ones that would allow you to use Isabelle or Lean instead.
Picking your brain. Somehow React+Redux feels the stuff of horror stories. Which of React, React+Redux, Vue, Vue+Vuex will lead to the least disaster for a sloppy team?
Sometimes a good product costs more money.