skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, author here! I'm excited to share a project I created to scratch my itch: a generator of a PDF calendar for ReMarkable tablets (and possibly other e-ink devices). It's pretty niche, but I'm really happy how it turned out.

It started as a PHP script [1] to quickly verify the idea. I got lots of great feedback on it [2], plus I used it for a few months myself. But I've hit a few technical walls with the (otherwise very competent) PDF framework I chose [3]. Most notably, it only supported a subset of CSS and layout was done using tables (hello, 2000s!). This led to a growing list of pain-points (links did not span the whole cell, not easy to re-order elements, etc.). I also kept thinking on how to make this project more approachable - without needing to install and know a bit of PHP. However, since it was a PHP script, that meant PDF generation on the backend. Which meant abuse protection, beefy server, etc.

So I rewrote the project from scratch [4], this time in JavaScript. Using react-pdf, I was able to move PDF generation entirely to client-side. It internally uses Yoga Layout, which means flexbox, finally! (subset, but still) React allowed me to extract and re-use components better. Internationalization was smooth as well. Web workers ensure the browser does not lock up (unless you're generating the full PDF in Firefox, for some reason...). Everything runs in client-side, no data is transferred to any servers. Privacy FTW!

There's many features available [5], but one I wanted to highlight here is how I've achieved sharing and preserving configuration (so that you can share it with friends or regenerate the calendar next year). Since I wanted to avoid storing any information on my or (even worse) third-party servers, the options were limited. Stuffing the data into the URL was probably possible. But it's unclear what are the safe limits of URL length. Plus, you can easily lose the URL. Downloading the data (a JSON file? Copy & paste?) was also clunky - how to explain to users what this file is? It can also be easily misplaced.
Then I realized - PDF files can have embedded file attachments :) So I'm saving the configuration file inside the generated PDF calendar. So if you ever want to reload the same settings (they are backwards compatible), you just upload the same PDF file (of course, PDF parsing happens on the client-side only as well). It's much safer approach and more intuitive - you will always have your PDF calendar file :)

In case you give my server the hug of death, the app is also available on GitHub Pages: https://recalendar.klimer.eu/

While the current version is tested only on ReMarkable tablets, it should be fairly easy to add support for other devices. Please open a new issue on GitHub, ideally with the specification of the device (screen size in pixels or mm).

[1] https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/odpl07/re...

[3] https://mpdf.github.io/

[4] https://github.com/klimeryk/recalendar.js/

[5] https://recalendar.me/features
No they aren't, they are organizations that utilize collective bargaining in place of productivity or efficiency increases in the labor force, thereby diluting the labor market with an artificial baseline at levels lower than the market would dictate otherwise. They don't transfer any value, they just reduce the overall value of the industry and provide the illusion that union members are receiving a satisfactory portion of this reduced value.
> a user-friendly alternative to proprietary DRM systems.

That’s a non-sequitur. RMS would have something pithy to say about pretty handcuffs or such, but all I have to offer is: the user friendly alternative to DRM is having no DRM.

> The largest consumer publisher (Penguin Random House) is but less than 1/100th the size of Apple or Amazon.

Won’t someone think of the billionaires?
"0 guarantee" might apply to accidental bugs, but a developer maliciously sabotaging their packages?
> NPM is not a trusted repository

It's not. But it's rather trivial to run your own registry, and many (most?) companies do exactly that.

> It's up to you to make sure that what you add to your project doesn't contain malware/vulnerabilities.

That's why, again, many companies run their own registries, and don't download random files from the internet.

> Having a lockfile will ensure that if you download a dependency to review it for vulnerabilities, later re-downloads of the dependency will not have changed files.

And to generate that lockfile... you need to first download a random file from the internet. Got you.
Processing charges? Compared to what? The processing charges of BTC or ETH?
nope, I was told rust prefers to a light stdlib approach.
freeload is a fairly loaded term. "disclaims any warranty" isn't the same as malicious action; I don't have to pay you if your house burns down if you don't have an insurance policy (contract) with me but I'm still liable if I commit arson.

Also, AFAIK, Marak is not the original author; Is he also a freeloader for attempting to commercialise this code?

> teaching an important and principled lesson here

The history of this issue speaks differently to their intentions, but even so, there is a way to "teach lessons" and that's by doing something alarming but harmless. AFAIK Marak wanted to cause harm, and acted in a way to do so.
Sympathy yes, empathy not so much.

Abstract thinking pretty much makes it so that you can reason about your emotions, so you're not subject to that of others.
I really liked an article on the subject of sustainability in open source by Dave Rupert. See https://daverupert.com/2021/12/sustaining-maintaining/

One of the of the points Rupert drives home is that open source with the goal of sustainability doesn’t have a framework in place that doesn’t lead to burnout. Everyone just learns lessons the hard way without any real manual for successful outcomes.
> sure but is that not how a browser works?

Deno is not a browser.

> for example to add bootstrap to a site you import like this

I know how to import a file in a browser. However, Deno is not a browser. The whole subthread is about managing dependencies, which Deno fails at, and its proponents come up with the most ridiculous things to justify it.
I still use a T430 in my kitchen, great laptop.
The tip on purchasing business grade laptops applicable to several companies as well. I have the P series and it's going strong for 5 years after all the abuse of grad school and internships and now another degree. Apart from the wear on the rubber coating on the lid, the plastic is still robust. If you want upgradability from Lenovo, I think P series tick most boxes. The form factor is different here.
Once in a lifetime – American crises in 2021, 1941, 1861 and 1781
Makes sense. They might be initially more popular in areas where companies tend not to treat their technology folks well. Game development, for example.

Though there are some things that are pretty universal and unions would help with. Things like non-compete agreements, ownership of code written in off work hours, collusion across companies to "not poach", and so on.

I imagine some of that might be a lot worse if the state of California didn't happen to take the positions they do. If Texas were instead the hotbed for tech companies, I think unions might be more popular.
> Why do so many here seem to be so proud of their lack of understanding of the value of NFTs?

We have codified our lack of understanding into a digital token and attached it to an entry in a crypto ledger such that no one else can claim ownership of said lack until we transfer it to them. Thus we have created something not just prideworthy but also scarce and valuable.
Edit: It’s $2 billion revenue and $429 million loss in 2020, which seems even worse.

But note that Zynga’s losses are primary due to acquisitions they make to expand. They spent roughly $2bn on acquisitions in 2020 and $750mn in 2021.
Also the people who are shitting on them are probably the same kinds of people constantly job hopping looking for a higher paying job and more social clout.

Half of the antiwork sub is just bringing that mentality to the lower paid workplaces, that when you've got a bad boss who is hiring new people at a higher salary than you, then you should find a new job that pays better and fuck all the loyalty nonsense. Bad bosses deserve to be stuck with bad employees or no employees. Nobody should put up with that. Workers should be aggressively suing over wage theft.

But cue the emotional meltdown over how they're all just complainers, while your job hopping is just smart...

Company loyalty for thee, but not for me...
> And if so, why would companies want to hire them?

I've often thought the best programmers mostly do it as a hobby, instead of imparting their skills to a company where what they've programmed is discarded within a week and has lost its value quickly.

On the other hand, there are hobbyist coders who impart their skills to a side project / SaaS product that they /fully control/ and the code won't be discarded a week later. The value remains.
It seems like the Open Source ethos also could also use some additions like:

1. How to maintain a healthy approach to your popular code.

2. How / why to say no without looking like the jerk.

3. How to find / manage help when you need it.

Handy skills for life too...

Granted plenty of folks do it very well, but there's nothing about Open Source that necessarily provides any of that and some folks who love to help, share, and solve problems fall into bad places.

That also leads me to wonder how much complexity for most projects is even needed. I kinda wonder if for most projects maybe 90% of the people using the code use it for a handful of tasks, and yet the vocal loud folks demanding more are a very small minority...
I just want to give a BIG thank you to geerlingguy. I use a couple of your Ansible roles and they're great! It's amazing how much work you put in and it's most appreciated!
Then about 80% of the world wouldn't know how to pronounce it.

A quick test in google would suggest that CNLabelContactRelationBiaoMei doesn't introduce too much ambiguity (first result for Biao Mei is still about the correct term), so even without unicode it might be fine.
The hard questions in DS/ML interviews I've received over the years aren't the theory questions (which I rarely get asked), but the trick SQL questions that often depend on obscure syntax and/or dialect-specific features, or "implement binary search" when I'm not in the mindset for that as that isn't what DS/ML is in the real world.
While this is a “major” newspaper in the sense that it has a large readership, it’s also the Danish equivalent of the Sun. And they are know for chasing whatever they can to get a story and having no morals. Their editor in chief spent a year in jail for buying credit card transaction information about celebrities to stalk to spy on them.

This doesn’t mean they don’t have truth in their reporting, only that whatever truth is there is accidental and just seen as a tool to get attention or exact revenge on the governments which he has a personal vendetta against.
Ask HN: How to edit a phone number from the dialer screen? (iPhone)
I paste a number into the dialer. I want to edit it before pushing the green phone button. Can an iPhone do this?

My workaround revolves copying and pasting between Notes and Phone but it's 2022 now, it's time to ask.
Open-Source Digital Infrastructure for the Agriculture Ecosystem Foundation
> "union avoidance" employees/training.

The word you're looking for is "propaganda".
I tend to agreed because I’m very likely to retire/be financially independent much, much earlier than 65 thanks to my tech career.
> You may not believe it, but India's response to the pandemic has been nothing less than fantastic

Come on, India was probably the only country in the world where there were dead bodies floating in rivers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57154564

During the second wave in April-May 2021, which India had ample time to prepare for, hospitals just didn’t have oxygen.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/haryana/ex-envoy-dies-wait...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/04/21/india-hospit...

States purposely undercounted their death tolls by vast amounts.

https://twitter.com/deepakpatel_91/status/139341986118379930...

That said some states like Kerala and Maharashtra managed the pandemic much better than others like UP and Bihar, so your experience could be based on one of the better performing states.
Simula's take on the Metaverse: https://simulavr.com/blog/we-dont-want-the-metaverse/

TLDR: "We don't want to socialize in a Metaverse; we just want a productive VR Computer".
> The only reason the number is even that high is due to the high death tolls of people in high risk groups.

The only reason the fatality rate is that high is because people died? What are you trying to say here? What else would it measure?
I think this isn't documented extensively in English - there was a very flawed protocol called the JEITA 1.0 method used by every Japanese laptop manufacturers to measure battery life as an average of high power state and idle state, circa 2001-2014.

It measured _high_ power state by playing back a supplied 320x240 MPEG1 video file at LCD brightness of more than 20cd/m^2(20 nits) until battery cuts off, which was hardly representative of idle state well before 2014. When long overdue revision was made that year it bumped up load to an FHD H.264 file with minimum 150 nits with Wi-Fi connected but still hardly a high power state or representative of typical use case. Sort of a tragedy of commons.

Apple started ignoring JEITA method for laptops at some point, I think ever since the Intel switch, and I remember it taking years for their unusually short advertised battery life to be not taken as an exaggeration of absurdly underwhelming performance, but simply a more down to earth measurement. Only then the actual battery life of laptops started growing to today's actual-all-day length.

Your Toshiba from 2007 is likely from this JEITA era, and likely has brochure spec of 8 to 12 hours by JEITA, just like a modern laptop would say 6 to 10 hours of web browsing. So, battery life is theoretically worsening over these decades, and rapidly improving in actual terms.

Refs:
1: https://home.jeita.or.jp/cgi-bin/page/detail.cgi?n=84
2: https://home.jeita.or.jp/page_file/20140219114214_dP3lbRxp9F...
3: https://panasonic.biz/cns/pc/prod/note/jeita.html
FWIW It seems to me your comment about Rails is a more general comment re: frameworks.

Learning a language/runtime takes some effort but much less, IMHO, than learning a framework. Doesn't matter if that is Rails, Django, Ember, Angular, iOS SDK, Android SDK, React+Redux+???, and so on.
What about the incentives of the "scientists" doing this study?
It’s a real shame that the middle and upper classes in the US have abandoned having their teens work in favor of various, expensive, college application boosting fluff.

I went to work at McDonalds at age 15 and was part of a union. I have direct experience with what that is like. I don’t need to get my knowledge on the subject from flamewars between people pushing ideological agendas (most of whom themselves have apparently never had direct experience.)
Given the goals of the project, I was surprised that the design was a hardware play.

Most of the value could come from an application (for the first couple of years getting user feedback) and eventually an OS once commodity systems have been rooted.

I am hoping for this kickstarter and the team, but the price point is a big gamble for consumers.

It is roughly what I paid for my RTX 2080 machine and HMD with no screen door effect. I feel I already have the perfect Linux VR hardware, but inferior software like Virtual Desktop that I haven’t been able to adopt as a daily driver.
Don't miss out on one of the best mediums for reaching out to employers
Email.

I've helped hundreds of people with their job search.

I've consistently seen that the majority of interviews they get come through email, not LinkedIn.
No I use the current interface. It's really buggy, I swear. The karma fluctuation (normal to 0 and back) has been happening for more than a year infact. I didn't bother to write about it much, but today, I couldn't even reply and paste a copied text properly. That's what prompted me to write here.
Though I do agree with the general principle that humans are animals, when it comes to eating each other, it's clear that our greater flexibility (and understanding of our own biology) allows us to choose our diets to a greater degree than other animals. Given that, us eating fewer animals (for ecologocial, health, and/or ethical reasons) seems like the best approach.
I think you’ll have to define “superstar programmers” to get meaningful answers. Otherwise people will make assumptions that range from “autistic savant” to “famous personality” which is quite a large space.

For famous personalities, for example, the prestige and PR of the name alone is sometimes enough to prompt a hire.
Indeed. Not only are my ThinkPad T420s still usable around home (see another post here), but my AMD FX-8350, approaching a decade, is still going strong as my primary (gaming, photo editing, etc) desktop.
I like your comment. Basically it reads to me as "hype is real and has value".

It may not have any material objective truth or spiritual meaning but it has a perceptive effect on the world.

I appreciate the honesty but shudder a little at the implications. But I suppose it's one of the ways the world works. It's what we think has value that matters, that makes matter.
The problem is that it's always true. If you're open to changing your mind in response to evidence and arguments, then your current beliefs will depend on which information you've seen, and thus you will have been influenced by organizations who chose to promote information supporting their own beliefs. We're affected by the machinations of tech, but also the machinations of retailers and unions and political parties and editors and...

I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
Rutland is not even England's smallest county [1], it's the fourth according to definitions laid out in the Lieutenancies Act of 1997 [2]. I guess the copy editor kiboshed "Britain’s largest ‘Sea Dragon’ discovered in England’s fourth smallest county".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenancies_Act_1997
vim is kinda hard to follow and emacs is probably too complex. Start with some simpler open-source editors like joe, nano, or gEdit. neovim is probably a lot easier to follow than vim, as well. You could also peruse these github projects: https://github.com/collections/text-editors
Rust should have larger stdlib
Last time I was at a concert in San Francisco Bill Graham auditorium, I noticed that lasers travelled fixed path always pointing at the walls or between balcony levels, never at people.
Similar suggestion: if you're trying to learn the architecture of a big established project like Vim or Emacs, don't start at the top and try to follow everything. Start with a small feature you would like to tweak, implement, or understand. How does Emacs render the modeline, for example. Just finding the relevant code in the repo will give you some info. Read through it, follow its calls and the data structures it touches. Getting used to the code style might take a bit. You probably won't understand or retain everything about how this piece works, but in hacking on it you will naturally brush up against other areas and build up your familiarity with the project practices and larger structure. And you can use that as a stepping stone to check out another area of functionality.
You mean https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw ?
> That's all the security Bitcoin needs, more security than that is waste with no benefit.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of security spend. You just don't know how much is enough. If you could provide a trustless (or.. maybe even useless, trusted) mechanism for determining appropriate security spend, there is many Billion dollar industries that would love to hear it.
Since you say you scrape via VPNs, can’t they just send you cease and desist like tomorrow morning? Worst case your payment service will lock your money?
Well my point is that Minecraft does actually feature some decentralization vs the vast majority of online games.
I'm in a similar position. I think given the propensity for criminal organizations to "dabble" I think all unions should have federal oversight just like corporations (which don't have enough) and that there should be very transparent finances that are open to the Feds and to the union members themselves to prevent criminal connections. Also I have seen unions go overboard with "this is my job and will be my cousin Vinnie's when I retire next year". So nepotism/boys_club issues can easily form as well, at least in the 3 unions or so I have experience with through family members. I personally have never been in a union, but I can see pluses and minuses on both sides that can be at least under some amount of control with 3rd party auditors, whether that's governmental or via transparency from union members.
Another anecdote from the US (New York).

A friend of mine works as a cop. One day someone got shot and he had to help get the victim to a hospital. The victim was bleeding blood and eventually died in that hospital. A few hours later, the hospital provided the cause of death as COVID, because they found out that the victim had the virus ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Charge money to write software, Charge money to maintain software.

charge whom if you don't work in a company? If it was the case nobody would be writing open source code to begin with. Do you think students writing and maintaining open source libraries are being compensated by their university or something?
Midnight Coffee
But why upload it to Github or somewhere similar, do the marketing(a README that often promises something like enterprise ready Atomic transactions) and licensing?

If the work was to fulfil your own needs it would have been a private repo or a folder in your drive.

The moment you publish it, a social contract is established similar to creators of other free work like youtube videos etc. You receive cudos and fame, they receive a tool, entertainment, knowledge etc. When you fail your part of the contract, people can be very mean as the are mean on a Youtube vide that they don't like.
Obviously the commercial part is inherited to whatever clone is being made.
Wow, as a theater nerd I want to know more about the 1899 Ben-Hur play with live horses on treadmills and an enormous rotating cyc- The article for the play itself has more information but I can't seem to find much else online about it.
This sounds like you are attempting to make me responsible for the conclusions of others. While the thesis sounds interesting, I'm not in a position (either time or interest) to try and expand on the thesis that many others have set forth. I'm not cherry-picking (it wasn't my intent, at the very least), only reporting on the conclusions reported by others.
> an age category which didn't even exist at the times of most of those other pandemics in the list

They exist now though? And they died, so we must count them among the dead. Nothing else makes sense here.
There may be a small number of people with satellite internet. There may also be reporters on the ground that have satellite phones. Unknown if their PSTN network is down but dial-up internet over modem still exists.