skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “Since PDF can format text and graphics in arbitrary ways, you'll end up with papers that look like glamor and design magazines and laid out like Principia Discordia and Dada posters. You'll have embedded audio, video and 3D objects since PDF supports those, and since it can embed Flash apps, you'll have e.g. ‘RSS Reader, calculator, and online maps’ as suggested by Adobe, and probably also games. PDF also has Javascript and interactive input forms, so papers will be dynamic and interactive and function as clients to web servers.”

Those things don't happen in PDFs in the wild, or at least not to any great extent. It's not that technical paper authors have shown some special restraint and limited themselves to a subset of what the rest of the PDF world does. Technical papers look much like any other PDF and do much the same thing that any other PDF does; if they were authored in HTML, we should expect them to look much like any other HTML page and do much the same thing that any other HTML page does. Based on my experience of HTML pages, that would be a massive regression.

> Yes, as I mentioned under the link provided in the top-level comment, the non-use of a packaged-HTML delivery is precisely my beef here. The entire idea of using HTML for papers implies employing a package format, since papers are usually stored locally. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It's solved by the industry picking one of the dozen available package formats and some version of HTML for the content. Which would still mean that HTML is used for formatting. HTML could be embedded in PDF for all I care, if I can sanely read the damn thing on my phone.

The details matter; you can't just handwave the idea of a sensible set of restrictions and a good packaging format, because it turns out those concepts mean very different things to different people. If you want to talk about, say, Epub, then we can potentially have a productive conversation about how practical it is to format papers adequately in the Epub subset of CSS and how useful Epub reflowing is versus how often a document doesn't render correctly in a given Epub reader. If all you can say about your proposal is "a subset of HTML" then of course people will assume you're proposing to use the same kind of HTML found on the web, because that's the most common example of what "a subset of HTML" looks like.
You’re intentionally defeating (weak) access controls intended to keep you from reading the article without paying.

Would it be okay for you to exploit a SQLi bug on the website to access the articles just because it’s easy?
Apples and Oranges – A Comparison (1995)
I can save the jpeg just fine.
Really tempted to paint some of these, thereby closing the human > machine > human loop. Could be an interesting experiment.
IIT-Bombay, Delhi break into top in world university ranking
Thank you for adding the clarification. That was actually what I meant but I should have been more precise in my communication.

Anytime we try to force a sufficiently large group of people into one system, we're bound to create artificial distortions as a result of sanding down the rough parts, i.e. the outliers.

Part of the solution will have to be the offering of multiple paths toward becoming a productive/successful citizen.

There's a second problem here as well, the status quo problem. When a sufficiently high percentage goes through university (and all in the same age bracket as well.), you create a signal that if you don't go through traditional education, you're somehow defective. Thereby, removing the option of choosing a different path because of the stigma (e.g. starting university at 36 instead of 18).
It's abstract per construction. There's no intent, no meaning, no purpose, no origin, no artist into these.
It’s for listening to clips of old music, not email or banking. It’s literally replicating data that is otherwise being publicly broadcast through the air unencrypted.
> This means for every disengagement, they've driven for 13,158 miles on average. That's 1000 orders of magnitudes from your "5km".

That's four orders of magnitude, not a thousand.
Most metals are crystalline, so while the atoms are bonded together they're all bonded into big lattice structures rather than neat little ones with covalent bonds.

(Changing the distribution of crystal size and shape is an important part of metal forging as it affects strength and ductility)
Ask HN: Advice for turning a side project into a (tech) startup
I've been working on a side project for a while, and enough people are asking if/when they can use it too that I'm going to build this into an app. It's a money management tool for European markets.

I'm planning to self-fund and work on it full time. I haven't found a co-founder so I'm starting solo. I've got decent technical and business skills and I'm not concerned about the technical learning curve, but I think prioritization and attention management could be difficult. I'll need to think rationally not emotionally, and avoid being a perfectionist, for example.

What advice would you give me?
Can you recommend any great books/resources?

Thanks!
No, the video would be taken down and he would have to sue them (and probably Google) to get it reinstated and the strike reversed.
> Outside of very niche programs you didn't see skeuomorphic UIs much at all in the 90s or 00s.

We must have lived in very different 1990s then. Everything was "files" and "folders" with icons that looked like files and folders. One of the big features of Windows 95 was the Microsoft Briefcase, and it sparked a big debate back in the day about whether or not we should stop using these real-life metaphors everywhere, because it was a really confusing program -- sort of, but also not sort of like a briefcase. E-mail/PIM programs had task pads that looked like paper pads and contact lists with initials sticking out of a pack like in a rolodex. Media players looked like real-life players. Word processors were full of elements straight of electric typewriters -- not just the icons on the buttons, but the page layout, the rulers...

A lot of these things didn't look as good as they were going to look on Aqua because they were introduced back when you'd be drawing with GDI on -- if you were lucky -- 133 MHz machines. There was no compositing and few consumer machines could do proper OpenGL anyway.

Aqua used colour and animation more plentifully, but other than the degree to which it used them, few things were new. It made it obvious that "Save" was the default action by colouring the button blue just like Windows made it obvious that "Yes" is the default choice using the dashed lines. (Edit: by the way -- that was definitely not the first time someone used colour like that. Since few other styling options were available, virtually all TUI interfaces for DOS indicated the current choice of button using by colouring it in a particular way). Icons bounced in the dock to get attention for dialogs just like taskbar buttons blinked. Aqua certainly did these things way better, but most of them were familiar to us, they just looked so damn good!

Also, FWIW, making icons under the cursor larger had very little to do with Fitts' law -- since the icons were already under the cursor, there was no benefit to making them bigger. Maybe it helped make the current choice more obvious. I don't recall the "official" reasoning -- what I do recall is that most users turned that thing off because it wasn't just distracting, it was pretty hard to get at the icon you wanted. Making icons bigger shifted nearby icons a bit, and the zooming effect wasn't applied uniformly, which led to having to "chase" the right icon. I think Apple turned it off by default after a few years, too (around OS X Tiger or Leopard, I think?). Many people thought that OS X had done a great job at updating the Nextstep interface except for the damn dock, which it kindda ruined.

> I'm sorry but Kai's Power Tools was not some sort of UI design trendsetter.

I certainly never said that. KPT was a trend follower -- it was just a very representative example of one, just like Aqua and the iPhone.
Looked like generic anonymous hotel/office art to me.

Technically this is great, but I guess I am not able to appreciate the art itself... but then I get zero feeling from "real" art as well. Shrug
This is the system we had before. Each city had its own timezone. It was changed so trains schedules make sense.
You are conflating Uber and the Uber driver.

The driver does not quote anything, Uber does and both the driver and the customer accept or not.

They have a very limited way to choose the ride they take: they have to make the decision in a couple of seconds, they may not know the destination and they are punished for declining too many rides by Uber. Does not scream free choice of what ride to take.

It is possible to bypass Uber and exchange numbers, yes. But the Uber platform itself does not let you build your own clientele, such as letting you look for the clients you want or the other way around. The question is not whether drivers can build their clientele outside of Uber but inside of Uber.

They do indeed have flexible hours, something that is apparently - reading the comments of this thread - impossible as an employee in the US and thus a feature of being an independent worker, but in France you can be an employee and have flexible hours, so that does not make Uber drivers independent.
Ask HN: Experiences transitioning away from being a Software Developer
Hey HN crowd,
I am Software Developer for around 8 years now and I am experiencing less and less fund doing coding work. I am freelancing so I can switch projects every 6-8 months, and I always feel less fun doing the actual implementation of a feature but rather conceptualizing and thinking through (product) problems.

Now my wife gave me the feedback that for the past 2 years actually I don't enjoy coding so much and often end projects with this mentality.

I wondered if here are some people who made the move away from coding day-to-day?

Is Business Analyst a viable career path? What about pay? I am earning well above average (from Europe) and also a bit worried of course about other salaries.

I still love technical problems, I still love developing features and be part of a team doing that. But I found myself reading more finance books then programming books, and my day-to-day coding tasks are just not fun any more for me.
can I double vote this? :))
Ruby doesn’t use yacc as intended though - it’s definitely not a good advert for yacc.
I’ve been using Rancher for years. Version 2 is all about K8s, but version 1 is super simple to set up and manage with a nice and clean GUI and pretty much no new concepts.

Unfortunately version 1 is abandoned now (I think) but it’s stable and I haven’t had any problems with it. Give it a go.
You mentioned something along the lines of deploying docker compose into kubernetes.

I find docker compose simple, and k8s quite complex. So if I can deploy a docker compose kind of project into it that would be nice.

And then on top of that it would handle or greatly assist with fault diagnosis, making sure the thing is highly available etc. There seems to be a lot of weird mistakes you can make with k8s which result in downtime of the app. If you have a full time dev ops person they can train and learn all those corner cases, but for a busy team that uses it and is doing other stuff it is too hard to stay on top of it. I have probably spent 8 hours in total seriously learning k8s! The rest is hacking.
Community wisdom has long held that good error recovery is impossible for automatically generated parsers and I unquestioningly accepted that wisdom for years. When I was building a Yacc system in Rust, I eventually investigated further, and found that there's loads of work in this area over several decades. None of it ever found its way into real parsers, probably because it was too slow. I extended some of that work a bit, made it more efficient, and took advantage of the speed of modern machines and now have an approach to automatic error recovery that you have to do quite a lot of work to beat with a hand-rolled parser. More at https://softdevteam.github.io/grmtools/master/book/errorreco... if you're interested!
Under the DMCA that isn't the case. Platforms, including YouTube, are required to react to your claims if properly submitted.
Have you considered the Google App Engine on GCP in standard mode? That seems like a good fit based on your explanation but I could be wrong.
It all looks terrible to me but then so does 60% of the stuff in the museum of Modern Art.
If a belief is comfy enough, people won't abandon it :)
What's the best provider for Malaysia? Which would you recommend?

Additionally, what type of support does Huawei/Alibaba offer for startups?
A few people died following that bet though
Up the hill! Both ways!
TLDR:

> Low prices make us feel like we're tightwad bastards (Scrooge McDuck style). But bargains make us feel special and smart. And they allow our brains to change the narrative, "I didn't spend $60, I saved $45".
Clear Your Terminal in Style
Of AWS/Azure/Google Cloud, which one would be better in terms of connectivity and reliability? We're deploying a solution that's quite critical to our client's core process so we need to make sure it's always there.
That's depressing if true. I would much rather the price be the real thing all year round rather than waiting for a fake sale every second week.
> The orbit isn’t stable, so eventually 2020 CD3 will be flung away from Earth.
> That's questionable design for sure and it's generally recommended to avoid null values. But Optionals have nothing to do with that.

On the contrary, a selling point of Optionals is that they let you avoid that problem. Like I said, you could have a Map.getOption(key) function that unambiguously tells you whether the value is present or not, because it only ever returns None for absence, and will always return Some(value) (which might be Some(None) or Some(null), but those can be distinguished from None) if the value is present.

> I don't agree that putting `null` in every optional just because of few bad APIs is a good idea, because people use Optional exactly to avoid dealing with nulls.

Optional should be a transparent, consistent class that can contain any value that's valid in the language. Maybe Java will eventually reach a point where null can be considered invalid, but until that day, having Option ban putting null in it because it's old and deprecated makes about as much sense as if ArrayList banned you from making lists that contained deprecated classes.
This doesn't work for me. I was put on Concerta for 8 years, which essentially eliminated my appetite, so my bodyfat% is low enough that I sink in water unless I take very shallow breaths while keeping my lungs very full (90-100%). Otherwise, my head floats low enough that my mouth is underwater, or I downright sink to the bottom of a pool.
Tailwind vs. Bootstrap
OCaml has structural typing with full type inference:

# let f obj = obj#foo 1 2;;
val f : < foo : int -> int -> 'a; .. > -> 'a = <fun>

but it's generally not called duck typing.

I think the more dynamic nature is really the crucial difference. In OCaml, if the function above had an if/else, and called #foo in one branch, and #bar in the other, the type of the object would be inferred as having both methods, and would enforce that at compile time. With duck typing, you could pass something that only has #foo, so long as the right branch is taken.
DragonFly BSD 5.8
There is some interesting stuff there, but the article doesn't really examine its own premises for declaring some styles and designs infantile and others not.

For example "bright colors" are infantile. Is a subway map infantile because it uses simplification and bright colors to communicate complex information clearly? Is a red/yellow/green traffic light infantile, while a grown up traffic light would use say beige/gray/eggshell?

The attitude is a throwback to when GUI's where considered for kids while real men used a green-on-black command line. But now skeuomorphic and "drop shadows" are grown up, while "lighter, brighter and simpler" is infantile? Isn't is just that "new" is infantile?

The article builds a whole societal analysis on these unexamined premises.
I’m a very happy user of Rancher 1.6 for years. Simple, nice GUI, got everything I need, works fast, can deploy as many apps /services as you wish, no new concepts to learn (if you know Docker that is).

Used it in my previous agency to manage clients websites and use it now in my startup to manage multiple envs with few apps (api, front end, workers) and nice and easy deployments via GitLab CI.
Tesla is not a good piece of evidence. They registered a grand total of 12.2 autonomous miles in 2019. Their "Autopilot" is a particularly fancy driver assist system; if you take their marketing at face value and treat it like an autonomous driving system you are putting yourself and everyone on the road at risk.
Is cruise and waymo doing the same thing ? Their cars also look the same.
My TLDR ;-)

> People don't want low prices, they want bargains.
it seems too me like kubernetes aims to replace the existing service-mesh consisting of de facto microservices (load-balancers, remote-logging, systemd, xinetd, ...) bonded by unixy conventions with.... a monolithic, proprietary system. Proponents are then advocating to build decoupled microservices on top of this. Am I the only one who thinks this is shizophrenic?

(on the other hand: companies claiming to make the world a better place by selling ads to the highest bidder are shizophrenic...)
Why Standard Time is better (2019)
Curious. I wonder if analogous “traps” could be added to software.
It's not only about opportunity for gig economy workers, it's about us all paying the price of gig economy business operations. Uber's business model can be extended to virtually any job, if we lower the barrier to entry just like Uber is trying to do for the taxi business.

Their model is to be a gatekeeper to customers via their platform - if they are successful, none of those blue collar workers trying to climb out of underemployment will have a chance at running a small ride business, because only large platforms have access to customers.

If everyone suddenly becomes a freelancer, companies are free to push externalities onto society because there will be enough people willing to take the hit to their rights/benefits for any kind of employment. It's a race to the bottom that benefits only the company that has access to the customer base.

We have to choose whether we want that or not.
Huawei raise the share developers can get to 90% in ad revenue
Apple, Samsung, Sony among 83 global brands using Uighur Muslim 'forced labour'
- Companies like Uber seem to prey on large pools of semi-innumerate drivers who either don’t realise they’re operating a loss and too desperate to care.

Without hard data this is just a far fetched claim. You are implying that „a large part“ (how large?) people are too dumb to make this decision for themselves. Even though I do not doubt that these people exist, what is the relative threshold where all others should be restricted by rules made for that geoup? Also I would argue that there is a learning effect if someone notices he operates at a loss and can learn from others who are making a profit. This might be very valuable in fighting „learned helplessness“.
But as you might notice: I am always in favor of doing things the hard way, with short term pain than obfuscating the price signals for short term ease only compensating the symptoms.
"forced labour" = "slavery"
Probably very similar things - there are only so many useful types of sensors and good places on a car to put them.
Would (standard time - 1) be even better? Does the data exist? I think Chinese should have it.
Very cool. Listened to some French and African 70s stuff.. Thanks for posting this.

One minor glitch -- user registration form wouldn't work for me.

It told me there was an error, therefore "my email must already be registered".
T-Mobile customers can see a real live A/B test contrasting well-trained, thorough domestic support personnel versus an offshored organization that seems incented to simply dispose of calls as quickly as possible.

I have a particularly complex set of service combinations with T-Mobile. Any changes to my account configuration or devices can result in downstream breakages, especially when one promo crowds out another.

I used towork in support, and I was the first person in the company to carry the title Advanced Support Engineer. I know the initiative and the depth of knowledge it takes to be a truly effective support engineer. I have been consistently impressed by the personnel in T-Mobile's Eugene, Oregon support operation, which I tend to encounter when calling during conventional business hours in my time zone.

in contrast, the overseas support operation that I land on if calling off hours has been worse than useless, so much so that I generally give up and live with whatever breakage has occurred until business hours if it all possible. They are just that bad. They may execute the most basic, redundant, rote solutions, generally, but they demonstrate no discomfort in flat lying about both solutions and what steps they've taken... especially account credits. One of these screwups was so severe that it took a dedicated rep in Oregon hours of research and numerous tasks spanning a week to repair (plus follow-up three weeks later to make sure the fixes "took").

It's absolutely night and day -- awesome or excruciating.
I use only small subsets of Azure, but every bit that I do use leaves me with a feeling that I'm the first user of a minimum viable product.

To pick a random example that I'm familiar with: Azure DNS Zones.

When I used AWS Route 53, the main issue I had with it was that I thought the cutesy marketing name was stupid. That's about it. By reading through the docs, I learned a little bit about DNS I didn't know, and I got to learn about the clever engineering that AWS did to work around issues with the DNS protocol itself. In the end, it had more features than I needed, and the basic stuff Just Worked.

When I tried to use Azure DNS, their import tool shredded my data. I then wrote a custom PowerShell import tool, but it took hours to import a mere few thousand records. The next day my account was locked out for "too many API calls" because I simply had the console web gui open. Not used. Open. The GUI showed entries different to the console tools. The GUI string limits don't match the console tool. The perf monitor graph was broken, and is still broken. Basic features were missing, broken, or "coming soon".

You would think DNS would be one of those services that "just works", but nope. Bug city.

Now mind you, most of those issues are fixed now, and they're adding more features and fixing the issues those new features are introducing.

But ask yourself: Why are buggy features being rolled out in production? Did nobody test this shit? Did they ever do a load test? Did they even try basic things like "have the console open with more than 10 records"? Why am I discovering this? Do they not have thousands of customers who have battle-tested this stuff?

Clearly they're just throwing things over the fence and letting support tickets be their QA feedback.

PS: It's even how they use DNS themselves that's just wrong. E.g.: If you use Azure CDN you end up with like 6 CNAME redirects in a row. The DNS standard says CNAMEs shouldn't point to other CNAMEs! At a minimum this is slower than it needs to be, but it's also less reliable because there's more points of failure...
I have missed a certain weekly meeting twice in the past few years during that specific week where Europe has changed hours but the US hasn't...