skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Parsnip – a tool to learn a language using books and NLP
I created Parsnip (http://solarmist.net) and I'm getting ready to share the prototype I've been working on for a while now.

Its an e-book reader with a parser and built-in references along with a review system.

I think of it like an IDE and version control for reading books in a foreign language.

Things HN might appreciate about it:

* parses all of the text with NLP to provide rich-meta to the user. Conjugations, part-of-speech, and readings/pronunciation (for character based languages)

* it also parses it to make an example sentence database; to create exercises out of later while reviewing

* then it automatically looks up those words for you in a dictionary and other references showing them while you are reading

* it also tracks the words the user has seen by lemma (dictionary form) grouping conjugations together

* it creates exercises and reviews using the content in the user's library.

* finally because it tracks words I'm able to solve the problem that flashcard apps have for language users; having to choose between single word cards vs sentences that inevitably have redundancy.

Once it's live available I'll updated the thread.

Ask me anything. I'd love to hear feedback from people as well.
Hiding and Replacing Content in Signed PDFs
> rarely

> outside of a total bubble deflation.

Detroit is rare, and Detroit's bubble popped hard at the same time as real-estate in general.
Well spotted, thanks.
If you see someone getting scammed on the street, like at a tourist trap, wouldn't you say something? Because this is the same situation, and why it bothers me.

It's literally a scam. People are throwing their real dollars into the BTC market because they were sold on vague concepts and bullshit viral articles like in the OP.

Maybe it's the investor's fault for being dumb and not doing their homework? Sure, so long as they weren't mislead, otherwise they're victims of a scam.
Have you played with NixOS? The initial learning curve is steep, but the payoffs are pretty nice.
Unsure what you mean there, as the linked tweet was from 4h ago.
Now that's dedication, I can't imagine doing the same with Excel (though it's definitely possible).

I've never tried this but what does coding in excel feels like? Does it feel like an ancient version of scratch?
The talent that makes one good at coding challenges also makes one good at implementing real world solutions. That's why the biggest companies use Leetcode to test interviewees despite having huge resources to pick any other method that promises better predictability.
Interview with David Fox about early Lucas point and click adventure games
I just calculated by risk of dying from COVID-19 on https://www.qcovid.org/ and it is 1 in 15873. It is about the same risk as dying from a car crash in one particular year. And I am overweight.

My son is 16 years old, so I cannot even enter his age in that tool. I had to enter 19 years and it gave me the risk of 1 in 1000000 for death from COVID-19, which is lower than getting a blood cloth from the vaccine.

Why on earth should he take the vaccine? Why are people even thinking about making it mandatory, even for teenagers? This is absolute madness!
Would you agree it’s still bad UX if it only happens to people who haven’t gone out of their way to get a “good” Firefox?
I don't particularly expect the cloud to be problem free. I do expect it to be possible to, when an issue is caused by an outage or a service issue, get that escalated to actual engineers. That has not been easy, IMO. Even obvious stuff, like "we sent X request around Y time and got Z 500 Internal Server Error from service S" have required multiple round-trips.¹

Messaging around transient issues helps. E.g., AWS would often email us to tell us "hey, sorry, such & such VM is being hosed by the underlying hardware, it is migrating but you'll see a forced reboot". That's all I need to know: I expect some interruption to that portion of the system, and I expect to see it heal within a certain time frame, and if it does, great, no support ticket required.

Azure sort of has that with "Resource health"; but, e.g., one of our recent support tickets is that we had a VM reboot unexpectedly due to a resource health event with its disks. And then, a few hours later, another VM, same resource health event, same issue, same reboot. And then again, a few hours later. And that pattern, with no further communication, requires me to write the (obvious) ticket of, "So… what's happening?"

(That ticket ended with such and such service was experiencing an incident. Never made the status page. It did make the internal "Service alerts" page.)

Part of issuing a PM is also to help show & convince me, the customer, that I won't be filing support issues for the rest of my life. But this last 6 months has just felt like support ticket after support ticket, and it's sort of depressing, since I'd rather be coding. I do think, last spring or so, it was no nearly this bad.

¹Every place I've worked at… we page on 5xx codes sent to a client. If Azure is internally doing that, it sure is hard to tell from where I sit.
I'd like to see this person actually get paid for what is essentially a million dollar fix
Appreciate the suggestion but this looks like a provisioning tool. Puppet is more or less good enough, it's the OS and its mutability which is our problem.
Not that I’m a Canonical stan, or anything. But have you looked at MAAS [1]? It works decently well in my small-scale lab testing.

1. https://maas.io
I have the soldering iron that is based off, the TS100, and it's really useful. The CPU lets you regulate temperature, and it has features like lowering the temperature when you don't move it for a bit. That's what the CPU is there for, it's really just a microcontroller. Good luck making a (minimally decent) soldering iron without one for temperature control.
Spaceplan is a pretty fun and slightly comedic play through one as well http://spaceplan.click/
Show HN: Use Historical Weather Records to learn Python
You're looking for "Cable Lacing", a somewhat lost art in general that is still useful in large data center deployments as well as whatever you are trying to do, of course.
Tell me that is not cool.. being able to say you had that much of an impact on million of players across the globe. Not to mention, bragging rights and cool achievement you can put on your resume ( that anyone should be able to understand ).
You just described not making money.
Con: They taste gross.
Maybe graalvm native version could be competitive
I would say that many of the issues with Firefox for Android (Fenix) come from the fact that there are a lot of modular components that get managed by different teams. My experience is that whenever I've encountered a bug in Fenix that has a dependency on a GeckoView issue, it doesn't get fixed for at least a couple of months. Examples include the inability to copy magnet links and the inability to download images that need cookies attached to the request, like the ones for Cloudflare's DDoS protection. There is literally nothing I can do in those cases except use a Chromium-based browser. I may be biased, but in my experience having more than one repo with their own separate PRs and commit processes slows down bugfixes by an order of magnitude, even more so when they're managed by different teams.

For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.

I think that Mozilla has good intentions, but they pushed out Fenix way, way too early, which broke the experience for users of previous version of Firefox for Android. And it seems that their mobile team is understaffed and overworked. I don't blame them, since they're essentially trying to create an entirely new browser (minus the rendering engine). But should be labeled as a beta, if not an alpha, in the state it's in - not "release-ready" as the version on the Play Store. It's proven that web browsers are too important in this era to get wrong when so much of our lives depend on them. If the experience is even slightly inferior to Chrome, the average user can easily switch and never end up using Firefox again.
Maybe scanf didn't redo strlen on the Playstation stdlib.

I mean the PC version was released one year later. Maybe by another team.
The most annoying and least suspicious thing for me personally would be the person on the other end playing back my own audio with a delay, just like the echo of your own voice that you get sometimes on a bad phone connection.

This way I would blame it on my connection, not the other person, who is actually causing it. In a team setting, it goes like "Oh, so we're all hearing our own echoes. We should quit and try again" If there is one person acting as reflector with the right delay (echo generator) for everyone else, that could work, in theory.
Sure, if they're interesting.
Have you checked out Digital Rebar? I’d be interested in hearing anyone’s experiences with it.

https://rackn.com/rebar/
The linux.dev mailing-list service launches
Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize.

Edit: an anecdote from the professor of my college's startup program (a hundred-millionaire former CEO/founder)- "never say sorry."
Maybe a Sheepshank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheepshank ?
People learn imitating previous work. Until 1930, the main reference for acting was silent movies or theater. A different medium where you need to overcompensate with body movement what you can't express with the voice. Some silent film stars were still struggling to adapt in 40's probably.

On the other hand, stereotypes and racist jokes were still part of many films in those years. Actors in roles of bad guys or soldier enemies were expected to act weird, clumsy and unable to talk correctly. The social rules about what was acceptable clothing or hair were also much more strict than today also, so many common gestures related with hats or clothes feel a little stiff today.
Ask HN: Do you block JavaScript? why?
In 2013 gov.uk did a test to see how many people received ran their site's javascript[1].

They found that for 1.1% of visitors the javascript didn't run.

0.9% was because of errors — network errors, browser-extensions breaking the code, a mobile user going through a tunnel.

0.2% was people who actively blocked javascript.

I'm writing an small article about making sure websites work for that 0.2%.

1. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/
The headline is misleading, half of Europe put AZ on hold. Because the complications hit young health workers. We prefer to keep our health workers alive, maybe other countries have other strategies, just go ahead, maybe we will follow.

On Monday Germany, Spain, Italy, and France were among those to suspend deployment of the vaccine, following similar moves made last week by Denmark, Norway, Ireland, and others.
I agree. Every webdev should know by now that you also need to tell visitors the screen resolution that a webpage is best viewed with.
(Too late to edit) benhoyt's comment points out that _count_elements has two implementations, one in Python and one in C. The Python version is used only if the C function is not found.
I did exactly the same thing: login prompt -> exit.
Yes but it's the only one that's a requirement if you want to actually use your phone.
I love the idea of using US spelling. Even being English myself, I've come to accept that the US spelling is always better. Although they should take y'all out back and shoot it.
Tbh: Looks more like they haven't been aware of it.

This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.
I know he didn’t work there, you’re missing my point: editorial control is not censorship. It’s not censorship when my PR fails code review, it means it needs more work. Similarly for journalists, editors exist to hold them to high standards and if those standards aren’t met it’s not censorship, it’s just part of the job.

All newsrooms have safeguards in place to ensure what they publish is credible, and policies for handling mistakes and corrections when stuff slips through the cracks.

The fact that Greenwald threw a tantrum when held to standards that most working journalists are (and should be) held to does not make him a brave truth teller. It means his credibility is suspect.

Pretending for a moment that there was a terrible editor who was conspiring to squash a well-sourced story, a competent and ethical journalist could simply bring the story elsewhere to get published or pass along their findings to another journalist at a different publication. What a charlatan and a hack would do is raise a big stink, cry wolf, and direct their audience to a substack where people can pay money to hear more, free from any pesky fact checkers.
That's what's cemented Englishes ascendancy. No one wanted to give the British yet another advantage, now they're gone.

The French have already lost that battle (English won), but I doubt they'll ever stop pushing their language.
where would one draw the line between a "social media" server and a P2P social/blog server?

number of users perhaps; geographic distribution of users?

monetization, or for profit operation?
I fall into that 15-20%. I'm quite tech savvy and spend a lot of time in front of screens, so it's odd that I react so poorly to VR. But I simply can't balance while using a VR headset.

Interestingly, I have a neuromuscular disease. I would guess this is part of the issue, even though I don't experience dizziness/lack of balance as a day-to-day issue.

A friend of mine has similar issues. She has chronic sinusitis, so I wonder if that is the cause.

Anyway, I have to agree with you here. It's going to be a bit difficult for VR to catch on if 1/5 of your friend group can't play/participate without injuring themselves.

The question is, how common is this really? And if it is common, would growing up with VR make the next generation less likely to have these issues? Or is it an immutable problem for people with certain brain structures or health issues?
They are relatively close, enough so that unknowns may change the equation. Are there more unknowns for covid in young people, or more unknowns from the vaccines?

(I'm not commenting on how to solve this equation, just pointing out other factors)
Since I couldn't get to HN, I wrote up how to make the site resilient to outages: https://gist.github.com/peterwwillis/ce2bfaba7fc72e4af44c281...

tl;dr 1 server x 2 providers, different regions, replicate content
Delivering excellent customer service in the Covid-19 world
Because it's a game that has been in developpment for 8years, the game as of now is very different from 8 years ago from when it released. You can't compare a game just released with a game that had that much iteration with thousand of people.
Review the information you have obtained from the analysis
Please explain what you mean. At first glance, it sounds pretty similar to the way the Go GC works.
Thanks! (And thanks for all your hard work!)
Novel Speedrun Strategy: Time saved with dirty disks
GitHub stands with security researchers on DMCA Section 1201
Yeah, safari is the new internet explorer.
they did, if you click on the link in the post you replied to, you'll see it is a link to their post from today about the outage.
The more i look at snap, the more i dislike it.

The same goes for flatpak too unfortunately.

Currently I feel like AppImage, while kind of a hack, might just be the best solution.
If a comment is faded and you're having trouble reading it, you can click on its timestamp to go to its page, and in that case it should be rendered normally.

I know it's an extra hop, but hopefully better than nothing.
Microsoft's Azure cloud is hit with an AAD authentication issue
Question: what is the other things that need doing?

Obviously does not apply to engineering effort outside of hacker news website, which the team might be working on.

But this forum has seen little change over the years and it's pretty awesome as is.

(Though I didn't use HN api too much so not sure what's going on that side).
A few years ago I started a small side-project (https://improvtonight.app) to help find shows at local improv theatres. I stopped updating it at the beginning of the pandemic, but have started brushing the dust off again. Along with in-person shows, I'd like to include an area for virtual shows, as I suspect those will continue to be produced at least in some capacity.

If anyone has any theatres or virtual shows they recommend adding, please let me know either here or via email (found in my profile).

One of my favorite virtual shows is by a team here in Chicago called Cigarette Sandwich (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/931265538). I think they've adapted really well to the virtual medium.
>if this is a serious post,

Why would this be a joke?

>My two cents are, unless we're talking about very high aptitude in a domain (say the top ~0.1-1%), most is reachable through deliberate effort for most people.

Yes, that amount of aptitude is where I want to be. Who wouldn't? Furthermore, do you have evidence for the claim that anything below top 1% is achievable by anyone?

>What stands out from the example of the postdoc is that the first thing she did was and took online Berkeley courses on data structures and fundamentals. If you learn fundamentals before you hack away you can safe yourself a lot of time, because a lot of leetcode problems is just identifying and applying CS theory.

I had a degree in computer science. I had more of an education than she did. I also looked at lectures of similar kinds myself.

>To get better being frustrated and sinking hours per day into something is not a healthy or good thing. Focusing on weaknesses, having a plan on how to improve, studying fundamentals even if it isn't fun or rewarding and keeping schedule is how people get better.

Why do you assume I didn't do any of this during my 5 years?
Highlights from Git 2.31
If you click on the "X minutes ago" it takes you to that comment's page, where it's not greyed out. Or use this bookmarklet to ungrey all comments on a page:

javascript:(function(){var i,x=document.querySelectorAll(".commtext");for (i=0;i<x.length;i++) x[i].className='commtext c00'})();
I mean, it doesn't actually say that, it says "I will do no harm" and "I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing". That doesn't mean that doing nothing is fine, because you didn't do harm.
Even if they knew how many people are using it they still wouldn't know if more people wanted to use it.
More and more guix or nixos seem like good practical choices for these kinds of use cases. I prefer guix as it's a little less finicky (though https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix is probably required for all non-purists such as this lowly worm).

Ubuntu OS is now stinky doodoo, which is a shame as it used to be the cat's pajamas for ease of use. Snapd is a debacle.
For the most part, it is not the tech, it is the content & artistic value they put into the game.

So I don't think it relates in this tech situation. Tech-wise GTA5 is not that interesting for few years now.
Why put people that are at low risk from covid at risk by giving them a vaccine?
How, if you don't mind me asking? What did your path look like? How did you go from job to job?
The cynic in me also wonders if this is propaganda I just don’t k is from where. Who would benefit from “Leetcode tests intelligence, only inherently intelligent people can program, therefore nobody should even try to be a software engineer unless they can leetcode” all of which is false.
Plus, with a massive customer base and eating their own dog food makes their schedule be a priority over other customers. Your priority is lower than theirs.

Microsoft is always a shitshow this time of year. Infrastructure changes usually land ahead of spring releases.
To be clear, I am not saying a company shouldn't maintain technical docs. In fact if I know something can be found in the docs, and I get a question about it, I am simply going to direct them to the docs.

I also do not discourage a developer from trying something on their own if they feel inclined to do so. That, for me anyway, is most of the fun of programming: the problem solving.

I think that asking a developer to "try it for an hour before asking" is just wasting another hour.

There are many ways to solve a problem, I want to make sure my developers have the access to me that is necessary to develop the best solutions.
I've had my eye on it but haven't played with it yet. From a bird's eye view and a discussion with a friend, it doesn't sound ready for production, but I'm not ruling it out.

I think it would be a battle to convince my colleagues and managers to try NixOS precisely because of the learning curve and lack of experts in the hiring pool out there.
Ha if only this were true. UK companies are requiring employees have the vaccine and ba is requiring the vaccine to travel.
Unprivileged chroot()
I'm a dire hard Firefox fan. I won't switch to Chrome, but I may start giving Qutebrowser and others a look. All Mozilla has been doing is playing catch-up with Google, chopping away at excellent (even if mildly used) features (RSS anybody? now this, plus others before), and occasionally embedding 3rd party, proprietary addons. Ok, sure, Mozilla ended up buying Pocket, but that wasn't the case when it was first added to the browser from the user's perspective... I remember Firefox before it was Firefox - phoenix, firebird....now we have a pretty decent Chrome clone with some legacy features left (about:config), but not much else. Other browsers are looking better every day.
I think it’s quite common to get flu like symptoms. Several people in my family did.
That's pretty amazing by itself. But it was doing it without access to the source code that blew me away.
Reasoning with Dags: Structural Causal Models
Lower the temperature or turn off when not moved for some time, better temperature control via PIDs, set a voltage cutoff when running off battery packs...

https://github.com/Ralim/IronOS#key-features
Y'all can try to pry my quad-cpu 3-upi 4U HPE DL.580 from my cold dead hands.
I’d argue that the problem does make perfect sense and isn’t a “misuse of tools” if you manage to understand the goal of the interviewer, which is “watch this person write code for a solution to a well-specified but arbitrary (perhaps even silly) problem.”
They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. AFAIK they've just been adding content to the online portion for the past 7~8 years, and you don't need engine programmers to do that.
EU extends transparency and authorisation mechanism for exports of Covid vaccine
Robots and the Gender Pay Gap in Europe
Creator of the Zoom Escaper here... Sadly it relies on a web audio feature that's chrome only. Also too bad because I use firefox as my primary browser.
>Consider the following alternative scenario: instead of leetcode, what if you focused all of your efforts on finding ANY programming job?

Because I don't just want ANY programming job. In fact, that is the approach I took with my first job and hated it.

>You may not score a FAANG position, but you may make a decent living in your chosen profession. Sure, you may not get to use cutting edge methods or innovative libraries, but you'll help others with your coding ability, for instance, consider all the mom and pop websites out there that look terrible and perform terribly. Those sites are an opportunity for you or for me, less talented and gifted people, to provide value where the rock stars wouldn't deign to work.

I'm not interested in those opportunities. That's why I've been studying Leetcode as hard as I can, to get something better than my intellect deserves.