skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to detract from this, because it is brilliant, and I'll definitely use in the future as a last resort.

Before resorting to this, I've found that if I convert the PDF to an image, and send it as a TIFF file, that is usually what the organization's people are looking for. I haven't had to do that for years now.

On the extremely rare occasions someone asks if I signed it on "real paper" (lol), I say with a straight face, "yep, I'm a computer guy, I have a really good scanner and image software". I do. It's just gathering dust. Last time that happened was about 5 years ago.

Over 20 years ago, I wrote my signature in thick, black Sharpie across an entire letter-sized, landscape-orientation page, scanned it with the highest resolution scanner I could cadge at the time (600 dpi, wooo!), laboriously cleaned it up, added an alpha channel, then even more laboriously vectorized it. Ever since then, dropping my signature into PDF's has worked except for those situations where a physical, wet-signed notarized document was required.

At first I took to the trouble to convert the resultant PDF into TIFFs and digitally sign them. Then with some experimentation I found that flattened and stripped PDFs without the digital signature were accepted without comment. Further experimentation revealed to me that only developers like us could even tell the difference, and plain PDF's where I dropped the signature into them are accepted these days.

Now, I use an Acrobat DC stamp that I converted from the vectorized form, and haven't touched the old bitmap or vectorized versions in years. Ironically, the most secure option of digital signatures gave me the most problems.
Restaurants in Washington State Need to Track Customer Info for Contact Tracing
I'm a little confused by this.

To simplify, it seems like either you want developers that are physically present in London, in which case you have to find some and pay them London rates, or you don't particularly care if they are physically present, in which case I don't understand why you would pay someone working remotely from London differently from someone working remotely from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Presumably in both cases your company is getting the same value out of the employee. So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area?

In other words, it seems like if I decide to work remote and lie about where I physically spend most of my time, it would make no difference to the company but might make one to my compensation, which, ignoring any moral judgement, just seems strange for the company.
I absolutely love AutoHotKey. I've been using it for over 15 years. I used to use it to format my HTML back when i only used a Text Editor (similar to what this link is using for Markdown. I never use my right-control key so I map a lot of stuff to it. I used to have macros on rightctrl+b = surround the selection with <b></b> and later <strong></strong> (yes, it was that long ago). I had some nifty ones with logic for adding <a>s (looking for @ and http://).

These days I use it for fewer things, but still really useful. One of those is making chat applications that don't offer ctrl+enter to send a message - Like Google Hangouts (basically flopping the functionality):

#IfWinActive Google Hangouts ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1

^enter::
Send {Enter}
Return

enter::
Send +{Enter}
Return

Another extremely useful is this one, which will type what's on the clipboard rather than pasting it:

>^v::
SendRaw %clipboard%
Return

And when I hit shift also, it does it slow (for input lag situations):

>^+v::
SetKeyDelay 500
SendRaw %clipboard%
Return

Extremely useful for two main reasons. 1 being input boxes on websites that prevent pasting and 2. certain remote sessions that prevent pasting (like Kesaya or any kind of Console remote application).
Or that there is less demand for those skills in Indiana so the market for those skills in Indiana pays less than the market for those skills in a separate location. This raises the question of if "remote" is its own "virtual location" in terms of market. Unfortunately, there is not yet enough remote work for there to be an established "remote" market distinction.

For people where there is only a handful of people with those skills in the world, they command ny/sf pay wherever they live.
I mean CoL is a thing. There are some talent asymmetries in DevOps and InfoSec, that could command high salaries/remote work. Remote work in security vs. salaries support this.

But for your run of the mil developer -> senior developer, a large chunk of that $150k Bay Area pay for non-FAANG is COLA, no way around it.
It sounds like the product people are sitting in long meetings. Have you considered the idea that people were already disengaged in those meetings, they were just putting up a better front because they could tell everyone was watching them closely in person?

And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?

And now they don't have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.

The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.

Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.
Medical debt that gets written off doesn't impact credit scores. There's no reason that this would need to either.
>If you're not a car owner, how do you get around in vehicles?

With a subcription for the trams/trains/busses in my area. I use taxis sometimes, but not Uber. On holidays I like to share a car with others. If you share the costs, cars aren't even expensive.

>This is not to say that your decision is wrong

Thanks!
Microsoft officially support SQL Server on Linux and Docker now:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downlo...

No need for emulation.
Awesome. So happy to hear that. I've worked from home for 7 years straight. And although I recently went back to work in an office, I still think WFH should be allowed to any employee.

Sometimes, I just wanna wake up early, slam out my work, and have the rest of the afternoon to myself. I've done it many times over the 7 years of WFH. Enforcing everyone to be in an office for 8 hours is just silly. It should always be about how much work you get done.
Run build agent on a Docker container
Simple stuff works out of the box in the OS for most flows; Soundflower (as mentioned elsewhere) gets you the rest of the way.

macOS also has the capability to create an aggregate audio device from multiple devices. That's a pretty niche scenario, but I used it and I haven't been able to get something like that working on Windows at all. The fix was to shell out more $$$ to expand the inputs on my interface.
one could argue that it is a scam but so far it has benefited everyone enough so that they don't notice
If I remember correctly it was Commonwealth bank in Perth.
A trade-off which I'm perfectly happy to make. Charge me a carbon tax and I'll pay it.
if you use WebStorm or IntelliJ, Codota (https://www.codota.com) is also very good
I agree that workers in other countries deserve to get paid the same high wages I get paid for doing the same labor I do. If a company can afford to pay me those wages just because of the passport I carry then they can afford to pay, for instance, my Indian colleagues the same fair wage.

Let's not pretend that all companies are cash-strapped startups. The FAANGs of the world and the Fortune $x companies and the multinationals can absolutely afford to pay their global workforce uniform wages, but they choose not to because it's not maximally profitable to do so.
I came to the conclusion that the book is actually about mental illness, whether intentional or otherwise.
Maybe this is true if you are stuck with roommates, but given how terrible most open offices are now the bar is pretty low for home to be better.

My home office in my small 2br city center apartment has a better monitor than the one at my open office workstation, I can listen to whatever music I want, no BS small talk, and I don't feel like there are eyes on me constantly. Plus, commuting sucks no matter where you live, most city dwellers don't live within walking distance of their offices.

I do like the opportunity to socialize w/ coworkers from time to time but 2-3 days/week in office is more than enough for me.
Cosmology for the Curious [pdf]
Could you confirm for everyone that you're against respirator use and for lock-downs?
No, it was designed to benefit the kind of people who designed it. Namely, bankers and statesmen.
I can remember years ago trying to get Pidgin (the MSN Messenger client for Linux) to compile _with_ anti-aliasing enabled. This was not default for TCL/TK based programs at the time. Horrible! :)
Hey thanks. I am quite surprised to meet a fellow Nobler. I thought I was the only one. I self studied the material and no one in my social circle had read it from Noble.
one interesting, counterintuitive argument i've seen on how to prevent this is in lawrence lessig's book, "republic, lost" about the us congress.

his take is that public servants actually don't make enough money, when compared to their peers in the public sector, and that an important step to preventing regulatory capture is to pay them better. that way, people don't spend their careers in public service trying to avoid pissing off lobbyists they're hoping to work for later.

not sure if it'd work or not, or if making moves like this illegal is better, but it's definitely an interesting idea.
We changed the URL from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/uber-appr... to one that has a bit more info.
Univ of Arkansas Prof Arrested for Wire fraud and lying about ties to China
I'm glad for all the logic users and students I have. If you want to get serious about making music I'd urge you to check out REAPER.
I can’t stress this enough: Sweden is not acting as a control group. Every nation on Earth is restricting freedoms in some way, on a continuum, including Sweden.

Even if Sweden is used in a future study, we wouldn’t know the cost benefit outcome of a lockdown for years anyway.

A true control group would enact no policy changes and be a size and composition that matches the country you’re interested in.
I actually was writing C and lo and behold MSFT has a 16 byte char as their default. lol tchar
60% TQQQ / 40% TMF is the best portfolio.
A recession causes deflation, which costs people jobs and quality of life. When the Fed prints money, it's counteracting the deflation. When the balance sheet is trillions or dollars, there is no worry of inflation. The Fed can easily vanish that money supply by selling assets and unwinding bonds.

As you've pointed out, savers lose. In a recession without money-printing, their savings would've been worth much more. As it turns out, preventing job loss and lower quality of life is more politically appealing to decision makers than helping responsible savers.
The only terminal emulator you need for your development on Windows
The only terminal emulator you need for your development on Windows.
Some of my best friends are former coworkers. Given that we work at the same place on the same problems, there's a really good chance that at least some of us share the same interests outside of work.

My family likes to joke that they can tell who my former coworkers are or online friends because they call me jedberg instead of Jeremy.
It also supports self-hosted webdav. All of the processing is done in browser, though, I am pretty sure. My self-hosted version is just a bunch of HTML and JS served by nginx.
There might not be CPI inflation but there's definite asset inflation which trickles down to real estate which trickles down to rent which trickles down to money in everyday consumers' pockets.
So they say. Giving their track record, I don't see any reason to trust them about it.
What Is Kea?
I don't know, do you think that Google Maps and Google Search (and all of its contribution to QoL improvements) have been brought to you by way of exploitation of people? Which people?

Or if you're referring to the outsourcing of work to the 3rd world as exploitation, how does that square with the fact that the standard of living has been dramatically increasing, globally? Do you think that out-sourcing of work will happen forever? Why do we choose to out-source manufacturing work to China instead of Belgium or Japan?

I don't think that I disagree that resources are exploited, but that's true regardless. The only way to produce modern goods & services to people is through resource extraction. Either that operation is centrally coordinated by state actors, or it's de-centrally coordinated by corporations.
Similarly, I ran away from the Microsoft world because everyone was just 'drinking the koolaid'. I got out, into Python and django, and the problem was similar: everyone was drinking just a different koolaid.

ASP.NET MVC C# with EF has got to be one of the most solid web frameworks I've ever used. Open-source fanatics refuse to listen about why it's great... even though it's open source now.
Possibly "tolerance" to high levels of CO2, and/or a baseline level of cognitive performance that's already impacted by chronic exposure to high levels of CO2?
This. I don't know why people think we should go with one or the other. Why not just let people decide for themselves?
Maastricht and All That (1992)
If that irritates you, please don't check the grammar and errant placement of commas!

All jokes aside. Fixed, thanks.
isn't this a problem? https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf/blob/master/convertp...
Unix was originally a single tasking OS, that's what the U is for
> Printing money in to the hands of people who spend it is stealing from savers

People spending is the foundation of our consumer economy. In times like this the type of spending that is being supported by direct emergency payment measures to people isn't profligate. Regular people aren't taking the money to go to the casino - they're using it to pay for basics like food and shelter. Even if they're using it to pay for video games or movie streaming, at least it keeps some money flowing through the economy. In contrast, a savings glut leads directly to underinvestment in the economy, contributing to economic stagnation and even income inequality in consumer based economies [1].

Printing money to buy bonds from corporations, however necessary in the short term, should come with serious strings attached, like a public stake in the ownership of these corporations. Sadly, that appears to be blocked at the moment on various political and legal fronts.

Also, your savings are indifferentiable from someone else's borrowing if they are in cash at a bank or invested in securities like stocks. If it is cash at the bank account, it's backed by the FDIC up to 250k. If it's invested in securities, you get to deduct losses from your taxes.

If you really want savings that cannot be used for lending at all, you need to buy land outright, sit on it, and be content with zero to negative returns.

1. https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/69838
Thanks - I'd argue it's less about brand separation and more about actually testing viability and forcing a culture that considers survival when making decisions.

The ability to raise money is itself a test - if you can't get third parties to invest then that's not a great sign. Google's judgement may be impaired by being so close to it.

They could easily self-fund, but then they wouldn't get that signal. Forcing a company to survive out of the nest will influence the decisions the stakeholders make, they can't relax knowing that Google will just fund things no matter what, they have to be focused on shipping something people want.

At least that would be my guess.

It's a clever way to try and prevent the lethargic energy that comes from being a big company along with the inability for large companies to innovate outside their narrow domain (often even within it).
Why do you call the EU a non-country? They clearly share sovereignty with their member states in much the same way the federal government of the United States shares sovereignty with its member states.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 are being remastered for PS4, Xbox One, and PC
I'm not certain what the precise solution is but what we have now isn't working. Remember that Standard Oil was broken up as a monopoly back in the day - the fact that it grew so large before action was taken isn't great but even once it had nearly unlimited lobbying strength the US still overcame it and managed to break it up - same with Bell.

Industry experts will be in the pool of potential regulators - but that regulatory position used to be stable and lucrative enough to be the final destination as opposed to a stepping stone where scratching a few backs by relaxing some regulations could land you a future cushy job.
> With coworkers we have an opportunity for personal growth

I read this as an opportunity to act like someone you're not, aka, conformity. With friends, I can be myself, and surround myself with people I actually like, vs trying to convince myself to like people that I'm around.
>Yeah, I mean I'll leave pandemic out of the discussion simply because airco will make sure the virus is spread everywhere in the building, not just the team anyways.

If the air con is recirculating the air like in the case of that restaurant in China, that is true. Otherwise the risk isn't as clear:

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/can-air-conditioning-...

>...But I also see today that a lot of teams are not even sure what's being done just next to then, simply because everyone has headphones on all day. Creating a climate of inter exchange and communication in between teams is indeed key.

I agree. The best environment I've seen for that is individual offices with shared collaboration spaces near the offices.
Dialing in a iPad to the zoom w/ the notes/whiteboard app is a good substitute I think a lot about for this.
it occurs to me that you could do this with a lower tech method, just sign your name on a piece of scotch tape and align the tape on the monitor over the document, take a photo with your phone and then use that as the 'scanned image' in the pdf file.
No one linked yet? https://coronavirusstatistics.org
Nice piece of digital artwork, and inspiring.

I would like to see all the possible eventual shapes of all those trees beginning from the current state, given branch pruning choices.
You a Heinlein fan?
Leveraging Compositionality for One-Shot Imitation Learning
Past, Present, & Future of Computer Graphics with Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang
It looks like what is being used for the transformation is:

1) set to grayscale (optional),
2) add blur,
3) slight rotational tilt,
4) add gaussian blur (?)

You can go one further by randomly adding tiny artifacts (ie. specks) to add even more realism. Maybe even a simulated crease in a corner.
I took Searle's philosophy of society and philosophy of mind courses in undergrad. A lot of Searle's theory of consciousness is tied to biology. A lot of his theories were based on causal notions (thinking I need to move my arm, makes my arm move for example).
> and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry

Much render farm/graphics work was once Mac territory but given Apple's ridiculous pricing and lack of server options besides stacked Mac Minis or support for NVidia stuff many have shifted away. Truly sad...
And after you reconnect with your local community, form your own currency.
That might have been true once, but I think Microsoft-stack devs are a lot more command line savvy these days.

I don't think it's ever been that true. It's just a handy stick for some people to bash their perceived out-group.
Quality was good and calls didn't drop, but the mobile support was poor. The original design assumed that it can use both cpu time and bandwidth of peers, and that isn't very good for devices on battery and metered data plans.
Chronicle had two businesses under one roof.

One is VirusTotal, which is super important to the security community but I don't think generates enough revenue to live on its own.

The other is a strange "Splunk Lite" offering that as far as I could tell the main selling point was it was way cheaper because Google gave them free/discounted storage. The search was terrible. It didn't highlight important things or hide the mundane. When I saw a demo it didn't even support IPv6 yet.

But I guess every moonshot factory has to have its Challenger disaster to learn a few lessons.
That's now how I remember it.

I used skype before I had ADSL, and was amazed at the quality.

After MS bought it, I noticed a drop in quality, as well as an increase in reports of said drop online.
McKeeman Form
Rebuilding My Favorite Messaging App
> Fed-coin will have a half-life to encourage people to spend it.

You're absolutely right in everything you've said. And if you're looking at stimulating the economy your suggestion is certainly interesting. And I do see the importance of stimulating the economy to maintain peace and make sure the masses are placated and content. But, it's a bit concerning to think what that kind of consumerism will eventually do to the environment.
I wholeheartedly agree.

> If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily

This is it. Without self-driving cars this is the most important present you can give to a worker. What would you pay for an additional hour a day?
I was looking at this yesterday and was amazed at how featureful it is.

To promote/demote or move up/down a node, click or tap on the node and then tap/click the little arrow icon at the bottom. That will reveal directional buttons that allow you to do those things.
Frederick (“Fred”) Brooks, 1999 A.M. Turing Award Recipient
It's very annoying for someone who has been waiting to buy into shares at a reasonable price. Just like house prices they are inflated beyond reality by government support, pricing out many people.
It's the country with the highest absolute number of excess death, and the 2nd highest (61%) after Belgium (66%) of relative excess death.

And that's while lagging behind Belgium, which had a daily number of infection reported the past few days of about 20% of the peak figure. For the UK they're only at about 60% of the peak figure.

You're comparing two countries at different points in their lockdown-cycle. And this is very relevant in an exponentially developing health crisis where total-infected (correlated with total-deaths) see doubling times measured in days, meaning that comparing two countries 1-2 weeks apart can mean you're undercounting by 50% or even 75%. The UK's figures are worsening far faster than Belgium the next weeks.

And Belgium, by the way, is testing at a rate of 1.75x that of the UK on a per capita basis. If the UK ramped up testing as much, they'd likely fare even worse in these comparisons.

In other words, it looks like it literally is the worst managed country in Europe.

I don't know about you guys but being 'part of an outlier out of control problem group' is not 'proportionate for Europe' to me, and winning the prize for worst hit of that group, definitely isn't.
For those who like to listen and not read. Here's an automated podcast of this newsletter.

https://anchor.fm/talking-money-stuff