skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The PDF file format is anachronous.

When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user.

Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data.

A funny trivia. The PDF is suppose to be read from the end of file. That's why some documents need to fully downloaded before they can display the first page. Of course, nowadays most PDF are linearized and load, at least, the first page right away.

Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible.

I've other issues with the typesetting and the way color is handled (it has a printer first approach), but I think this post got too long already. I just want to point out the spec supports so many pointless features such drawing in 3D space, movies, audio, HTML support, etc.

Finally, I don't understand why most people are against a revision on the PDF format despite clearly having very little knowledge on how it works. I think multi person edition of the same entry with some version control can be useful. By the way, the format kinda let many people edit the document at once, as long as they are not working in the same part.
The only thing that makes them bad is how most of them ramble on and on (IMHO). They should be limited in character count, perhaps to tweet-size?
Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate people!
For the military inclined, "No shit, there I was..."
God, That reply is a million times better than the pseudo-helpful condescending crap they were spouting on twitter.
Write Your Own Art
Not OP but EFF's Privacy Badger is pretty great.
Travis tests both the development branch and the merge/integration branch.

https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/pull-requests/#double-builds...
I’m always a little wary about these claims. For example I worked at a Fortune 500 before and I created a setup on an app like Slack using my corporate email account.

There is a big difference between “used by company Y” and “used by tiny team X inside company Y” (probably without IT approval).
I enjoyed the link, great references to regulation. So, i have a hard drive of a server that needs to be encrypted. Could I encrypt the entire device? Or just a partition?
The timeline is compressed and key characters in the drama are shuffled in jobs and time for dramatic effect. It is almost as if adapted from a stage play, very much about the egos in the room. It has been critizised for ignoring the systematic banality of mass murder, but I think that misses the point of the movie.
As with all processors you can underclock it to reduce power demand. And since power is proportional to the square of the frequency you don't have to underclock it very much to get a good benefit in terms of power.
It's amazing how much driving a nice car in a downturn makes your employees hate you.
what would you say are the top few out there now? looking to adopt an editor for a large website
Google has proven that they cannot maintain even a MacOS browser by hosing Macs via their update mechanism.
Similarly, Danish has kept the 'dj'-sound in English loan words like juice, where Swedish dropped the initial fricative. That tripped me up a couple of times while in Denmark...
I don't have a good reason for thinking this, and perhaps I might be more likely to achieve certainty if I limited my query to the USA HN audience, but I think that there is a widespread sense that the internet, insofar as it represents some evolutionary mechanism, is unlikely to tolerate the capricious and childish tendencies that the state seems to continually embody.
Police used Google location data to find bank robber. He says that's illegal
> We are able to observe ourselves in our dreams acting without the constraints of our 'executive functioning' brain.

Interestingly this can also be achieved while awake through meditation.
Did you read the link in the comment you're replying to?
I'm not a fan of government-funded media. I think I'd like my media to remain separate from the state just as much as I'd like the church to remain separate from the state.

Local news was always done through a newspaper. Some large cities are able to have and support television stations, but the newspaper is the old fallback.

The digital newspapers I've used mostly suffer from poor design. I pay for WSJ. They've got a great app, it's streamlined and easy to browse. Most local papers don't have this. Their design is not consistent from city to city. I think local papers suffer from a UX problem as much as they do an ad revenue problem.

I think journalism needs a Spotify-like model to sustain itself in today's world. Users should be able to pay a single subscription fee and browse open content (with none of the partisan platform bias we've seen from the tech industry lately) and revenue should be split according to how much of a user's time is spent on each source. Tipping should be embedded as part of the platform.

Ultimately, this is a business model problem, not a government problem. Churches are able to function entirely on donations. Local journalism should be able to make a similar case, if they're willing to put the work in to rebuild their industry.
Tik Tok Statistics
It's famous that Mozilla and Firefox went through many rewrites and stalled progress. But I don't think you can blame that for IE6. Some amount of that is due to the Windows monopoly and that it was preinstalled.
Maybe, but Atlanta is just a much bigger population center.
Just remember, the people who read and respond to you are probably not the people who either implemented or designed features and bugs you may run across.
So Apple should develop the OS with no experience at all of developing applications?

That simply won’t work.
How do you feel about ProseMirror, and what browser WYSIWYG editor did you work on if you don't mind? I'm using it right now to build a personal notes editor, but there isn't much open source components to model my custom nodes to.
>My comment will never be seen.

This is false, I'm seeing your comment. I even see it when logged out (so no showdead).

>Some accounts get special privileges and vote brigades are allowed by some.

Is there evidence for this? (Besides of course mods getting mod privileges.)
See his remarks about cultural richness.
That outrage is pretty rich, since Germany spies flagrantly on other nations, including their embassies, as well.
Web browser have a massive NIH issues.
No. Your definition of a browser is wrong, and is what leads to your conclusions.
I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc (Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so much in a lot of places.
And Apple built it from the ground up. It's their hardware. They control what runs on it.

iOS isn't great software (ok, "good software" for 13) in a vacuum. It's inherently, inextricably tied in with Apple's world-class hardware; and vice versa as well. To allow unfettered access to both is a risk to users, whose trust in Apple has been built up over more than a decade.

It's not a monopoly. It's an experience.
What happens if you want to delete a file from the ISO?

edit: oops, I've read the article now, I guess aufs acts the same and creates a tombstone file.
Sorry for a wrong impression, I am not saying "socially normal" ones are psychopaths. If their natural reaction to someone's suffering is emotional support - it is totally normal in my book to do it. But for me to fake emotional support to support socially accepted norm without feeling bad about it, would be psychopathic behavior - do what others expect from you to not be frown upon.

And I doubt "socially normal" people "understand" such commiseration is helpful (i am sure it is, by the way), but they are genetically or environmentally conditioned to respond like that and it just happened it is majority like that.

Don't get me wrong. I understand it requires effort to be accepted, and i try to fit in. But being constantly under stress during my normal day, adding on top of it someone's else emotions about something they do not want to fix, but rather want to share stress with someone as a social interaction, is no good for me mentally (very different story at parties where I get quickly drunk enough to no pass out, but completelly turn off my internal problem solver btw - I can talk feelings all night long).
The whole idea is based on the famous, rambling and horrible "[i]t was a dark and stormy night..." opening [0]. A character count limit is missing the point altogether.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night
Ministry of Testing link has the wrong url.
In some of the state articles linked they complain about how small the digital outlets are. I think that's the question: did more people read the print versions of "in-depth news" than the digital versions now?

It's not clear if the decline is actually the decline of news or instead it's the decline of newspapers as a delivery medium, similar to the decline of CD's, DVD's etc. in favor of streaming.
It can't be that secure if "La Repubblica has had access to the video and audio recordings".
Why? People can just buy Android.
Ministry of Testing has the wrong url.
It's probably English that's the outlier here, though. 'W' is a double-V in other European languages, only in English is it called a double-U, and treated like a vowel.
I use HHKB everyday. Small keyboard is not fashion only, it also means less movement.

And also if I have to work on windows I my right hand is closer to the mouse.

I always find for full keyboard if I try to align G and H key to the center of my monitor, the numpad and mouse are too far and some desk don't have such a big space. But if I don't it's make my spine hurts, and I don't think it's good for anyone.
Iterate over JavaScript Arrays – Performance Comparison
You mean "the US considers it legal within the US". It's not legal. It's like the shit you see on Reddit about China and Russia spying, with the US playing the victim as if they weren't spying too, and better, before that. The same goes with corporate espionage and tech transfers. Hyptocrites. People were thrown in mental hospitals back in the day when they theorized about Echelon, Carnivore -- what we know developed into PRISM run by the 5 Eyes. These people should be ashamed and liable for all the problems they've caused at home and abroad. National Security Interests is an excuse. And a flimsy one. And one day, when the US isn't The Superpower anymore, they're going to pay for this shit if they continue this colonialistic, imperialistic bullshit.
Microsoft PROSE kind of does. I haven't looked at it for a while so can't quite remember, but might be of interest to you.
Agok
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/agok; my proof: https://keybase.io/agok/sigs/pk3wpmDphrlltAeFOKz70nNG6yrI---aczoSC-xxVf4 ]
Because I don't want anything to try to reflow the text, or adjust the kerning, or modify to use system fonts.

There are great systems for those already.

When I want a PDF, it's because I want a format that I know is always going to look the same.

A PDF is a great archive format.
It's perfect for a scan of a document, or a printout.

I never want my viewer to add anything to it, I never want it to detect anything, I never want it to adjust anything.

Just render it exactly the same way, every time.
Ah, yes. Because someone convicted of a crime going to jail is the same thing as someone being sent to a camp due to their religion. Equating the issues in the US justice system to concentration camps is ridiculous.
> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor.

Oh my goodness: triggered.

I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this.

"But, but, we used it at blah company."

"Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it."

I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, capricious, and neutered version of Microsoft Word 6 to edit the contents of a web page.

I will become extremely displeased with you if you waste my time by trying to persuade me it's a good idea. It's not.
I think that has something to do with it. I don't think they held guns to the workers head and told them "vote union and die", though it was certainly a tactic.the Pinkertons used in the past.

Lobbying can only do so much to change ones mind.
I have two main questions about Tik Tok that I figure the Hacker news audience will have insight on.

How is Tik Tok comparable financially to Facebook Instagram Snapchat or Youtube when "29% of monthly users open TikTok every day." compared to > 90% for each of the former apps. Moreover, "TikTok’s user base is largely based in India at 43% of all users," which is a low ROI zone as it is. Evan Speigel of Snapchat once said that "Snapchat was only for rich countries" when referencing India because the bandwidth verse revenue per user did not check out.

Tik Tok's bandwidth ought to be higher than Snapchat's no? Does Tik Tok just have excellent compression software or some unique value proposition on the technical side?

If not, what is the long term plan for Tik Tok? Given retention rates in Western nations it makes me wonder what a video platform can or will do
I paid for a semester of college at least thanks to that paypal program... I think it started out at $75 referral... then $50 to you and $50 to them, then 50/25, 25/25, 10/25, etc.

Within a month everyone on campus had an account.
I did not say that we should just look away.

I am saying the answer is not to have millions of Chinese and American innocents engaged in slaughtering each other or activities that support that.
I have an experienced software engineer's salary, few expenses, and yet... the cost of a whole console to simply play a couple of exclusives (when the vast majority of games are available cross platform and you already own another console or pc) is still too high, even though it doesn't hurt much financially, overall. It isn't an impulse purchase. And it makes you feel like a mark/sucker if you go for it - ~$400 for a video game or two or three is a rip off. And these days, they all have a subscription service you need to buy if you want multiplayer or game updates.

At the same time, I never feel compelled to penny pinch by selling/buying used games. And I like to keep them, as I'm sure many other people do. Time, effort and inconvenience is involved with used buying and selling, and for many of us, that offsets the value of actual dollar savings.
What makes a programming exercise good?
markdown allows arbitrary html. just paste in <table>.
At least in my experience all table format miss something that makes my tables illegable
A quick google search turns up this article[1].

> The German intelligence agency used the selectors to surveil telephone and fax numbers as well as email accounts belonging to American companies like Lockheed Martin, the space agency NASA, the organization Human Rights Watch, universities in several U.S. states and military facilities like the U.S. Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the secret service agency belonging to the American armed forces. Connection data from far over 100 foreign embassies in Washington, from institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Washington office of the Arab League were also accessed by the BND's spies.

[1] https://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intelligen...
Tracing for rendering deformed signed distance fields
I'm creator of BLOON (https://www.bloon.io). If BLOON had been put in the Table 1 in the paper, the values could be:

O O - - O - O

I think BLOON is closer than Git+GitHub.

And great article & paper! They do give us many inspiration about improving BLOON. Thank you!
Largely ignored by this article is that fact that everyone needs a router. NASs are far from rare, the advantages of storage on the consumer side of a relatively slow internet connection have advantages.

So it's not really 10 watt local server vs a shared of a cloud. It should be something like 0.5 watts or similar to upgrade your home router to something that could provide internet services. Likely just double the ram and provide a microSD card for storage and that would be all you need. A 256GB microSD card, even a fast one is around $50.00.

Seems like a bit of smarts, like a CDN, or even IPFS and collectively home servers could make quite a bit of sense with close to zero power overhead.
That's the thing... he doesn't know why he's locked out. They haven't "scolded" him or told him that he violated Apple rules. They simply locked him out and are giving him the silent treatment.
Chrysippus (Χρυσιππος), not "Chyrippus".
Kind of seeing a pattern here...

https://popular.info/p/facebooks-top-news-executive-has
But free market did liberalize regimes in both China and Russia, if you compare to the 1980s! It also fed their populations, that is, shortages of food are now hard to imagine.

The free market did not turn either country into an efficient democracy, that's true. It did not improve the tolerance to dissent to Western levels (sadly, not a particularly high mark recently). It did not prevent an authoritarian regime in either country, too.

There's no silver bullet.
This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?
I imagine it would probably cost more than a billion. I mean, we have football stadiums in the United States that run about that. If there's 2.3 million blocks, well, I can't imagine that these 2.5 ton blocks would cost any less than $1000 each (assuming you're not cheating by using cheaper material like concrete). The cost of materials alone would probably cost a few billion.
The only part that wasn’t normal was it becoming a publicized story. What do you think intelligence agencies normally do, ask politely for confidential information?
They listed three things, and they're all different.

Choking & CPR in an hour - easily. When I did my course it was a few hours but in a smaller group there'd be no problem covering it in less time. Though to be fair, we did have to read a document and answer a 70 question assessment before being allowed in the room.

First Aid? Probably not. I did a full day course. Here in Australia that includes bandaging for snake bites, what to do for jellyfish (don't pee on it, thanks), how to handle crushing injuries, etc. Apparently in the US they focus more on weapon trauma wounds though we did a bit of that too.
> But it's legal for the US government to do abroad, and breaking other countries' laws and sovereignty to obtain intelligence is more or less the entire job of our intelligence agencies.

Team America: World Police
> weekend warriors who fly in and out on short tours

Have you got some sort of problem with reservists?

> Are the technicians going to fly in to a warzone

Yes? They flew into Afghanistan all the time to fix equipment.
Nintendo does exactly this with Amiibo, to be clear for the people that didn't catch this reference.
"It was a dark and stormy night..."

- Casino Royale, ST:TNG
Syslog + something to massage the data (sh/awk/sed, perl, python)? Like we've been doing for simple apps for decades?
Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned.

If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?
Recently integrated Quill into our app and it is fantastic — as fantastic as a WYSIWYG editor can be, I suppose. It produces valid, sensical HTML as the output, in case you need to take the result and use it in email templates (which was our use case). Highly recommend.
Wouldn't also be possible to identify mass-shootings and other panics from the acceleration and location data of crowds? Anonymize it first, of course.
Is there a way to read the guide on one page, or as an ePub or PDF?
I understand its a hugely popular service and there is a lot that goes in to something so big but there are bigger websites that run on much much smaller teams of developers. I just don't understand how there is even enough surface area on the app that 1000 people could be working on it at the same time. Is that number counting people working on the ops stuff or building other tooling not part of the main app?
The Xiaomi phones have this. You can create a "Second Space" with a different PIN (or using a different fingerprint to unlock it) from the first. When you use the second PIN it unlocks a completely separate environment which is not aware of the other one.
The rampant consolidation continues....
Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem.

And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.
Ahem.

http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html

Lyttle Lytton contest.

(no connection, just enjoy them)
There was a post on HN a few days ago about how SpaceX got a full examination, while Boeing more or less got a pass from Nasa. This is a different vehicle, but it gives an idea of the maturity of SpaceX. And yes, the earlier story was really more about trying to establish a pattern around the 737 Max failure, but that issue was at least complicated. This is just sloppy.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574080
> native MacOS spell check API

Which is great when it works. But Romanian (my language) is not supported by Apple (even tough they sell quite many things here).

In fact this is a good example of a dysfunctional company. Apple managed to translate to Romanian most of their help docs but they can't provide a basic spell checker.
He was employed by a foreign consulate but, in the mind of the Chinese government, he is a Chinese and therefore belongs to China.
3. disney doesnt time out login attempts per ip
There are definitely several things that I don't like about Slack, but their support has been very responsive. I've reported at least two issues, and they have always taken my input seriously.

A while back, I reported a bug with copy/paste, and they asked questions, acknowledged it, and had it fixed by the next release.

More recently, I had a question about why the UI behaves in a certain way I didn't expect, and they took the time to explain that it was intentional, and what their reasoning was for doing it their way instead of how I expected.

All of these experiences are way better than average for our industry, which in my experience usually just brushes you off without trying to understand your issue and tries to placate you with a non-answer or answer to something other than what you asked.
This article is very relevant: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...

It's a tricky problem, but I subscribe to my local paper as it's the only news outlet that sends someone to sit through the entire city council meeting. The TV people might show up and interview a few people before a contentious one, get a few shots of people testifying, and then leave to go produce the segment.
But wait...what happens to that small amount of energy that a heating coil gives off as light? I'd expect that most of those photons end up getting absorbed by something somewhere else in the room, and ultimately the energy still ends up as heat.