skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PrepDD | Frontend Software Engineers | REMOTE | Full-time | https://angel.co/company/prepdd/jobs

PrepDD is a workspace for accounting teams, connecting their tools, people, and processes in a single place.

We've hit a significant inflection point in our business and need to quickly scale up our product team to deliver on our current pipeline.

Current Open Positions (US-based, all Remote):

* Senior Engineer - Frontend (React, Typescript, Apollo)

* Software Engineer - Frontend (React, Typescript, Apollo)

Apply at https://angel.co/company/prepdd/jobs or reach out to hello [at] prepdd.com if you have any questions
Credibility isn’t the issue. What do you do about it though?
Have worked on a big, high impact Northern Europe GCP customer.

Support was hit and miss:

- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems

- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.

- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Indeed - and they have made a little headway here...

* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.

* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.

* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
Algorithmic unconscious: why psychoanalysis helps in understanding AI
Why not have both? I.e. directly elected MPs and PR.

One way to do this would be to have 90% of the MPs elected in 3-6 member STV constituencies, with every candidate belonging to a party list. Then total the number of 1st preferences each party list got, and allocate the remaining 10% of the seats to the parties to maximalise proportionality (e.g. by d'Hondt). The top-up candidates elected fro each party will by losing candidates from that party who got the highest vote share.

That way, each party will get a number of MPs proportional to its total support, and the individual MPs elected will be the ones the voters most like.

Choosing MPs by party lists means the MPs have to be loyal to the party, not the voters.
Free plans sometimes work and sometimes don't. A good example of where they (at least seem) to work well is Calendly. Every time you use the service you advertise it (even when on the free plan), and if I had to guess, a good amount of people eventually become paying.
Respect the opportunity is double speak for 'we only bother if we can get to a position where we can use monopoly pricing and tactics'. It goes against 'respect the user'. Orwell is the right thing to invoke, Google thinks they are our big brother.
News Break Stories on the Brain, Fitness, Weight Loss, Technology
I think the original samsung watch had a camera. A little pointless. The apple watch has a remote control for your phone camera which makes more sense
Yeah, me too. Not the public at large so. And public opinion is driving political decisions, especially in a year packed with elections.
A simple way to calculate Bayesian confidence intervals is sampling from Beta distributions. This is using the Beta(1,1) prior (uniform random) for both vaccine and control population.

The data suggests it is unlikely that the vaccine reduces infection by >=50% (<5% probability) and a probability close to zero it reduces infection by >=70%.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

# number of infections, and obs
infect_ctrl,obs_ctrl=714, 20
infect_test, obs_test=748, 19

sample_C=np.random.beta(infect_ctrl+1, obs_ctrl-infect_ctrl+1, 100_000) # sample 100k times from posterior Beta distributions
sample_T=np.random.beta(infect_test+1,obs_test-infect_test+1, 100_000)

# percentage reduction in each sample
perc_reduce = (val_C-val_T) /val_C

# histogram of % reduction in infection
pd.Series(perc_reduce).plot.hist(bins=20)

# how likely, given this data, is > 50% reduction in infection from vaccine
(perc_reduce >= 0.5).mean()
# c. 3%

(perc_reduce >= 0.7).mean()
# <0.1%
The nested FSMs were likely motivated as modeling tools for GUI event graphs. Unlike the relatively obscure wiki example [2], a GUI toolkit example would drive the 'hierarchical' part home: events are delivered to the lowest level in the component graph that can handle it.
> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination

In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
> Odd that the phrase "Swiss cheesing" is used.

The phrase we used to use a lot at work is 'Salami Slicing'. This was used to refer to time but more often to budgets, especially with the connotation that a budget proposed by a bid team would be reduced in lots of small ways before it went to the customer- e.g. to make the bid competitive, increase profit margins, increase the risk budget and many more.

The salami slicing almost always made it hard to produce a good solution within the eventual budget available to the engineers.
Fair point, although I wasn't referring to simply hoarding every data point you can get but specifically _using_ free users to improve your data set. Obviously this isn't a viable option for everyone.

Take a look at Google for a great example of this: Their "local guide" feature on Google Maps is using gamification to improve location data by convincing users to work for free; or Recaptcha using user input to train their machine learning models.
They wrote about it on their blog.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/07/an-update-on-sola...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/08/january-8th-updat...

Summary: they have no idea what anyone is talking about, nobody has told them anything and there are no known issues with TeamCity. Later they did a blog post with security tips for locking it down but they're all pretty generic things that'd apply to any CI system.

These companies that are banning JetBrains and thus locking themselves out of some of the best software tools out there are now suffering the consequences of years of mass hysteria over Russia, largely promoted by the New York Times. Every time someone read or quoted the New York Times as an authority on something and did not receive major pushback, it was another brick in the wall that has now led to this.

It was all entirely predictable. In 2017 I wrote about an even more deceptive and malicious article in the New York Times on the topic of "Russian Twitter bots" and Brexit. The story was based on an academic paper that superficially made it seems like credible expertise, but was intellectual fraud from beginning to end.

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

After that I started compiling a list of stories I read about Russia that fell apart when fact checked. I gave up after doing sixteen of them because it was just endless.

https://blog.plan99.net/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B4%D0%B0...

The thread article starts by saying, "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy". This is probably true but just makes it clear that education doesn't make people smart. The total unreliability of anything Russia-related in the "educated" press has been obvious for years. The only way for things to get better are for people to repeatedly attack the credibility of these outlets, in public, on any topic where they engage in deceptive practices, in front of the sort of decision makers who are now making snap anti-Russian decisions on the basis of prior articles.
Unfortunately the HP scanner doesn't fit into my meeting bag!
I can sign up to AWS and get world class service on day one with just a credit card.

That’s the bar.
Interesting... I think we might be interpreting the statement differently? It seems like you're saying the statement claims the difficulty is in deciding whether f(x) = 0 or f(x) = 1 when we see f(x) ≈ 0.5? If that is the only problem then the obvious solution would be "just use f(x) = 0.5 instead", right? (i.e. allow for an extra digit.)

Somehow that's not how I've been interpreting the statement until now. Rather, the way I read it, we don't know how to predict the amount of work it takes to guarantee correct rounding to any number of digits (even if we allow for extra digits beyond those we really want)—not merely to a fixed number of digits. Or to put it another way, it sounded as if for pathological inputs even guaranteeing >= N digits of accuracy isn't possible with a predictable amount of effort.

What led me to believe this is a couple of different statements from Kahan [1]:

A desideratum generally acknowledged but not always achieved is: "In error by rather less than an ulp if by more than half."

Reputable math libraries compute elementary transcendental functions mostly within slightly more than half an ulp and almost always well within one ulp.

Both of these suggested to me that errors can occasionally exceed half an ulp by a non-negligible amount. So, if we were rounding to the nearest integer, this would imply occasionally not only rounding arbitrary overshoots like 0.5 + 1E-100 to zero (whose difficulty you're pointing out), but in fact even occasionally even producing 0 when the output is 0.7. That's far worse. Is this interpretation wrong? If it is, then why should errors sometimes not be "well within one ulp"?

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/LOG10HAF.TXT
The waste majority of trucking is not actually super long range. So the waste majority trucking can be done perfectly fine even with current generation EV that are starting to come out this year.

There is a small amount of very long range trucking where there 'might' be a competition. However, I believe even that will quickly go electric.

So, even current generation trucks could do 80% of trucking. From there year by year they will be able to do more of the jobs. Hydrogen will lose against Diesel until BEV trucks will be good enough. In 5 years nobody will question if BEV trucks can do everything.

A properly engineered electric Semi is not actually that much heavier then a Diesel truck.
No, I edited my comment. I suggested that the callousness of exclaiming "good for them" is pretty bad.
It's not. Modern electric propulsion is generally more limited by power than propellant.
> Audio deepfakes, when they finally arrive for real, will simply reduce the effort required for voice impersonation. They do not make possible new feats of impersonation that were never possible before.

Just pulled this out of your ass or do you have a crystal ball?
A good slogan should have an inverse that is also a plausible slogan. E.g. "move fast and break things."

Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according to this criterion.
Adobe has lost my trust years ago, and I see that viewpoint vilified often enough to never use Adobe software again. The only Adobe product that I still use is Magento, and only that on client sites. I would love to find a non-Adobe alternative.
What I find interesting is just how well the Lotro of the Rings Online (LoTRO) brought all this to life...

14 years later, the graphics are a bit dated, but still very pretty. Moria remains my all time favorite zone in an MMORPG. The atmosphere, the scale ... its just _is_ Moria.

If you're a Tolkien fan, I highly recommend at least checking out some of the youtube videos - or even better, give the game a try (it has a free to play option).
Whats the p value? If p only below 5% this could be just happen by screening 'western' countries.
Alas the Great Suspender just fell prey to malware after its creator sold it off:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846504

I think Apple have the right idea with app review on browser extensions for Safari.
There is a Vietnamese sandwich chain that calls their sandwiches with cheese and mayo "European". So, yeah, I do think some people have a concept of "European cuisine".
Recommend Zoho as well. Their web client is insanely fast and filled with all sorts of power user features. The gmail client doesn't even compare with how slow it is.
Well, sounds theoretical, so this might not (probably will not) pan out. If it does, I wonder the implications for P=NP? Maybe QP=NP?
On a different note, why does your website look so refreshing (for lack of a better word)?! Beautiful design (non-design?).
> - From our own deployment of automation (software in services sector) we have not seen a fall in number of humans in the business where we deploy automation.

Such a fall in absolute numbers would not be expected if the reorganisation made an organisation more competitive (assuming it's just one of many in its industry), so perhaps you're doing something right.[1]

> - However, we have observed these businesses adopting human capital at a much lower rate than they were in the past as their business grows in favour of technology.

This also is expected. It's what happened with the introduction of ATMs in bank branches.

However those are side issues.

One of the major points of the article is that labour shifting is sold as automation. So we need to know: how much labour and cost has been shifted onto the customers and/or suppliers of the organisations you automate? How much has been shifted out to piecework contractors? What has the effect been on the families of the employees?

Without answers to questions like these we can't really make a proper asssessment of the full social benefit of your automation efforts.

1. A cynical take on automation projects is that they are often opportunities to shake out some of the dead wood that any large organisation accumulates--accumulates because, as other have noted, the incentives within large organisations act to increase the headcounts in various fiefdoms.

The other half of that cynical take is that in other organisations they are opportunities for one group of managers to gather more power over others. This is probably the case in hospitals, where specialist bureaucrats have an advantage over doctors, so "automation" projects shift clerical labour onto doctors (and nurses and patients) while "upgrading" admin work into endless and unnecessary "cognitive tasks".
Thank you. Unfortunately, it seems that OpenScan does not have the feature to straighten out photographed documents. Cammscanner has its own camera app, which has features specific to photographing documents.
I can see why the comment seems, prima facie, inappropriately nit picky for HN, but there’s a link in the article to another article where the author dissects the details of rhyming meter in the “Not all those who wander are lost” poem, and, having read that heroic exercise in pedantry, applaud this courageous commenter for epic drollery.

How many syllables in “fire”?

How do you pronounce “again”?

Huzzah!
I haven't had this issue with Camscanner, but I've had it with other apps. One outright disappeared from my library, as if I have never had it installed.
> "I dress for women. I undress for men."

A good demonstration of this can be showcased pretty heavily in the difference between how women are dressed in women's magazines vs. in magazines targeting men - whatever their state of undress.
What a lovely game it was: even though very small and basic, it made into my top ten by the time played.
Estonian firm to build modular nuclear reactor; major step becoming neutral
> Can not really put what people eat in Sicily and Lapland to the same pot

Exactly. For example the concept of 'Mediterranean diet' as referenced by the UK National Health Service [0] as a contrast to the UK's higher emphasis on meat and diary products.

[0] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/what-is-a-mediterranea...
WallStreetsBets Triggers 43% Spike in Reddit Installs
As I understand the conflict: EU negotiated a lower price than UK, but both parties got contracts guaranteeing a certain number of doses. When AstraZeneca got production problems which meant they couldn't fulfill all the promised deliveries, they decided to fully honor the UK contract and cut delivery to EU severely. This infuriated the EU, and they threatened blocking export of the vaccines produced in the EU.

More fun if it turns out the AstraZeneca vaccine is useless.
And that is why "innocent until proved guilty" is such an important tenet of Western justice.
I suspect they don't have the combination of strict privacy so employees can't look into the account, massive spam potential, and billions of users...
If you pay for google premium those playlists will show you what the video that is now gone/deleted was..!
How do you want to transfer your apps from Google Store? Is there any other service with those apps?
Reminded me of a company called Norse Power which is basically retro fitting wind sails to existing fleets. Still in the testing phases but they were saying that the savings on fuel etc were substantial enough to take note. Not the article I read but still some info: https://www.marinelog.com/technology/sea-cargo-to-retrofit-r...
You don't have to delete the old comment to do that. That is what makes it look shady. Deleting the old comment doesn't make it less spammy, it just makes it look like you're trying to hide the fact that you're posting it multiple times.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Voice User Interfaces
Oh yeah I think I should add that it was certainly not my intention to downplay the more popular lisps or their applications!
My point is that they should turn systemd into a real standard.
The more Google doesn't care about its users, the better more people move away from anything Google.
There's no need for extensions or userscript for this with Firefox. In ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/chrome/userContent.css:

@-moz-document domain("news.ycombinator.com") {
.hnuser { font-size: 20px }
}

You'll have to restart Firefox for it to come into effect.
I'm pretty sure you can do a similar trick with C++.
But would it work? People all over the world have proved to be extremely gullible, a vast majority can be influenced and manipulated, and the worst people running for election are usually the ones who won't hesitate to do that.

Brexit and Trump clearly prove people will vote against their best interests if properly influenced.
Are you referring to the analytics tracking (a la Google Analytics) or enforcing limits on user activity?

For a GA alternative there are many and what you should look for is an analytics provider (if you don't want to self host) that rotates salts. Basically user ip hashed with a random salt that changes every 24 hours is good enough to protect user privacy while allowing you to not count every page view as a unique session.

Of course everyone is counted as a new visitor after 24 hours.

On the rate limiting side, great question. I'm currently writing a series of blog posts around creating your own privacy friendly products (Part 1 is targeted at apps, part 2 will be SaaS) where I'll cover this in detail.

Here's a few key takeaways, if you can provide something without collecting any user data, do it. However for anything involving payment you need to at least know the users email (leaving aside cryptocurrency, I'm a big fan but it's difficult to accept as a bootstrapped business). Additionally rate limiting based on usage (which you therefore need to track) is kind of a given. The best we can do here is make sure user data is encrypted.
> Because I see a list of disparate platforms sharing the same init system

Which one? I just listed the others and they all use different init systems...

> So there should be no standard

No, they should turn systemd into a real standard. ECMAinitd :-p
I think dodgy is overstating it a bit. It's clear from the data in multiple trials and post-rollout studies that AZ vaccine is very safe and somewhat to very effective. There is a lack of gold-standard double-blind trial data to nail down answers to specific questions about efficacy, but given current overwhelming evidence of saftey and the raging pandemic it's entirely reasonable for e.g. MHRA to approve rollout.

The main question that seems to remain is effectiveness in over 65s. Essentially not enough older people became sick in either arm of the trials (e.g. due to lockdown) to make any conclusion. However there is definitely indirect data (antibody titres) to infer that efficacy is not reduced in older population.
It's really not that difficult so long as you allow a bit of flexibility. My team has a general rule that we schedule meetings in the morning, leaving afternoons free for focused work, but obviously if there's something that needs discussing with customers or other teams and the only time available is in the afternoon then we'll adapt to that.

I also fairly frequently block out chunks of time to get actual work done - every now and then someone will ping me and ask if there's any flexibility, rather than just assuming I'm completely unavailable for the next week. People aren't robots, they'll get used to it.
They also checked the customs forms, but we didn't hear anything (to my knowledge after). The head of the UKs vaccine taskforce also said she thought it was very unlikely that AZ vaccines were shipped from the EU to the UK (this makes sense, how would you ship them if those factories are not up to speed yet?).
Human support for Google Cloud has been very good, even on a small account.

Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
The browser has no way to send anything directly to the printer through javascript and probably not the best idea to let it either from a security perspective, especially PDF's.

It's up to the browser to render the page to the printer, if it contains canvases they are sent as bitmaps, since thats what they are.

HTML elements and SVG are generally rendered as vector commands to the printer which might end up being postscript or pdf. So svg's are much lighter going to printer then high dpi canvases. They also looks much better too since the printer renders them to the final raster at native res say 600 dpi.

Other browsers use a native PDF renders that can do whatever it wants, not sure what PDFium does in Chrome/Edge maybe it just sends the PDF if it can determine the printer supports it, otherwise it does native print commands for sure, it does not send bitmaps.

The nice thing about pdf.js is it runs on platforms that have no pdf viewer built in but have a web browser or maybe a buggy built in one. You can also style and control it yourself and add features to it for your app making for tighter embedding. Also it can be updated independently of browser.
Which advantages does buildpacks offer vs Dockerfiles?

> Familiarity with Docker and Dockerfile syntax is not universal. Even those with experience may not be equipped to write a Dockerfile that can quickly build (and rebuild) a small and secure image.

Are there any others besides writing a dockerfile?

(which can be non-trivial, I'm not underestimating it)
A patent for a similar technology (too lazy to confirm if it's the same) said the high density liquid is water + particles of magnetite.
Online glassboard (like Lightboard) but using just free software