skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> LaTex is one of the worst offenders when it comes to producing mangled text layers. Multi column text is often stored with both columns interleaving, or not at all. Verbatim is mangled, formulas are a hot mess. The text order between paragraphs is not preserved.

That's interesting. I must not deal with many LaTeX-based PDFs. The text in electronically-born PDFs I use is usually nearly flawless, with the exceptions of the bizarre extra space inserted between some words, and the challenge of hyphenated words on lines that no longer wrap in that spot.

> All those extra features you mention make your "still readable in 50 years" requirement go out the window pretty quickly.

I don't have your expertise, but I've heard a different story from librarians regarding PDF and particularly PDF/A.
I think that's actually somewhat standard- even FreeTaxUSA (my personal choice) does this because they're essentially letting you use their product on credit.
You're talking about skills, not willpower. Every study I've seen suggests that willpower is not trainable. Maybe it is, that would be great.

Note, that you can train altruistic and empathetic appearing behaviors. So yes, even though you're all starving, the men eat first. Yes, you are going to risk your life doing X. Yes, you are going to tell everyone its okay and appear calm even while you're panicking.
Show HN: Moodflix – Your mood, our suggestions
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846071, which was posted earlier.
I agree abt the importance of home cooking, bit if you have a chance, look into how stress affects digestion. The same food can affect the body differently based on its stress state.
> We can't have the onus be on individual companies to vet requests coming from random podunk police departments nationwide.

The onus is already on individual companies to vet requests from private individuals that want to move money around via Know Your Customer laws. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to verifying whether or not a request for customers' private information is valid or not.
Linuxulator – Linux Binary Compatibility on FreeBSD
I don't have much invested in crypto, and I find PoW hideous. I think crypto is most useful for illegal things and tradecraft, but illegal doesn't mean immoral, and useful to criminals is still useful.

* Buying VPN relays anonymously, for connecting to through Tor, VPSes etc.

* Buying drugs.

* Donating to causes sanctioned by your country.

* Paying informants.

* Allowing you to prove you're the author of something, or knew a secret, later on.

* "Dead hand" schemes which release information if your wallet activity stops for more than a couple weeks. This keeps people from killing you to keep something from getting out.

* Online gambling.

* Evading financial controls to send money to your family abroad.

Some of this doesn't require any trust (e.g. proving you knew something before some date), most of the rest requires trust, but what makes crypto useful for these cases isn't lack of trust but auditability, anonymity and/or lack of control by authorities.
It's "obvious" if you remember how the Taylor series for sin(x) works. The error between x and sin(x) is bounded above by x^3/6. So there you go.
I didn't...
Intuit was begging to be sued though. Literally the only word in the ads is "free", and they say it like 100 times to emphasize just how free it is. And of course it's not free at all. It can't get any easier than this.
The Infinite Exploitation of Cryptocurrency
Fortunately, state tax returns (in my experience) are pretty straightforward to do by hand once the Federal return is done. I'm sure some states are more complicated than others, that might be the prioritization to use if more resources become available.
It’s not available to the public or open source so you can’t. Only the smallest models might run on a single GPU, the largest would need a large grid.
> It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart people to believe it rather than have their intelligence insulted.

They don't hire the smartest people, they hire the greediest people. The only thing people worship in silicon valley and tech in general is money. That's it. An if your salary, stock options, etc are dependent on believing and selling lies, that's what you do. When an industry or group gets "saint status" or proclaims to be the agents of good, your spidey senses should start tingling.
Admittedly, this would assume the computer is connected to the Internet, but is there not some theoretically reasonable way to get entropy off the Internet? Maybe some server with a known certificate that can return entropy from lava lamps or similar?

I realize part of the issue here is kickstarting the process right after boot. But is that the entire issue?
What is the status of the AOT compiler? Still moving forward? Stuck for lack of resources? Release planned soon? :).
Safari most certainly uses macOS system functions for this and the macOS graphics system is partially based on... PDF graphics. Since that is probably optimized in any and all possible ways, I'm not surprised by this.
I disagree that profit is the right metric when scaling a fine to a normal person; $60k is the average American's revenue (not profit — I'm not even sure how I'd calculate profit for a human, in a year), so I use the corresponding amount — revenue — when comparing.

For example, a $10 fine to a company w/ a net loss but $1B in revenue is clearly not a large fine.
For investors from China, yes. For locals, not so much.
I'm curious what the original deal was, because Intuit doesn't even have the free system anymore. This year, they "elected not to renew its participation in the IRS Free File Program." [1]

[1] https://freefile.intuit.com/
> Actually mate they try pass economics of as a science so regularly they use it to influence policy.

I don't see how economics influencing policy means people think econ is a physical science. What I do know is that "you can't do that you'll ruin the economy" is not something economists ever say. That's something politicians say. Economists widely support policy that may have negative short term effects in order to achieve long term gains, but these policies aren't politically viable, so they are ignored.

The idea that climate change is in some way caused by economics is misguided. Climate change is caused by human nature. People are extremely unwilling to make sacrifices when they aren't sure they'll see the results. That's why our environmental policies have been so woeful, not because economists object.
I would posit rainy weather means some lower performance quarters in terms of stock price or performance in some way and GPS misalignments are strategic missteps with the overall direction of the company.
FYI this is an analysis of your average returns at YC: https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...

I still wish that YC would provide some more concrete figures, and ideally include separate figures for first employees as well as founders.

From link: “Most of the returns have gone to a tiny minority of super-successes. The founders of AirBnB, Dropbox and Stripe are worth about US$7 billion, about 80% of all founders’ equity, although they account for 0.5% of the companies. Outside of the most successful companies, it was still possible to earn significant returns. 12% of companies from the first five years of Y Combinator are now worth US$40 million or more, and a further 10% have sold for US$5-40 million. The remainder probably earned little more than their (low) salaries.”.
People who make more than the median tend to have more complicated tax situations due to investing, owning business, owning a house, and so forth, and generally have more complicated finances.

So it's not totally arbitrary, but I certainly agree that the US tax system is messed up.
You're awoken abruptly, you've just got out of grub, you don't have networking interfaces, you don't have any higher level cryptography libraries, the concept of connecting to something on the internet to get entropy in order to continue booting seems like a complete fantasy. You can gather what little entropy you have, mix it with suspicious sources like RDRAND, and paper over the cracks once you've got some better sources on the burner.
> We've tried this with the war on drugs, war on terror, war on
homelessness... haven’t we? Is your suggestion different somehow?

No, it's ill formed and to be honest you're probably the first person
to take it seriously enough to return a comment that isn't ridicule or
outrage.

Self-fulfilling capture, and indeed malevolent hijacking seem
unavoidable pitfalls of such projects, you're right. But I notice the
other wars on abstract nouns you mention are against human weaknesses
(drugs/exploitation, terror/wrath, homelessness/inequity). And these
always get twisted; wars on poverty become wars against the poor; wars
on drugs become wars on addicts; wars on terror become wars of
terror.

Is climate maybe different if it's an "external" threat? The danger is
that becomes a "war on nature" which is how we got into this fine
mess. So no easy answers.

However James is canny in reminding us that war is a (the) strong
organising principle for humans and there may be a way to twist that
into benevolence.
Why can't you sue the FTC?
But is Selenium’s requirements due to breaking changes actually existing? Or just a lack of effort to test multiple versions?
Why is Abramovich playing peacemaker after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Thank you!

> changing a search phrase or word and doing a new search, I notice the results do change, but there's no way to know if it really happened. Changing a Google search, the whole page flashes empty, that way I see/sense there's something new. In your case, a change is subtle, very subtle, too subtle. In one instance I had to look carefully to see the change in results.

That is a good point. I did try to remove any loading indicators because I thought it would be smoother, but maybe it's a bit too smooth for people to realize their search went through. Will think more on how to fix this.
> Does anybody have any background on why US Universities seem to universally focus on continuous summative assessment rather than formative assessment followed by summative assessment at the conclusion of a course?

Because a single summative assessment is worse?

Honestly, a single 3 hour exam is a horrible way to assess your mastery of practially any material.

There are few "good" ways to assess large classes of students for mastery. Small classess of students have a lot more flexibility. However, you can also get the problem that if the professor simply doesn't like you, you have no recourse--hopefully that class wasn't a requirement for your major.

I have been on both sides of this argument (lecturer and student). I had a Computer Arithmetic and an Analog Filters classes that were ferocious about grading--you had to be 100% correct or you got zero. That is really rough--if you blew an exam you dropped.

When lecturing in CS, I tended to be a little different--exams got a lot of partial credit, homework got some partial credit, but the 5 or 6 projects were 100% or nothing. Of course, the difference there was that I had automated testing running and you could resubmit your project as often as you wanted over about 2 weeks.

This was probably the best compromise I've come up with. It drives the students without pounding them, and it limits the destruction if you're just kind of "off" on a day when there is an exam.
This has been true for "Camel" (cdr R.J Reynolds, cddr British American Tobacco) promotional emails for months. I've been through the unsubscribe workflow several times but still receive emails. I do appreciate the irony - it's as hard to unsubscribe as it is to quit smoking!
Even today when, because if the pandemic, the work in line. I know it is hard to find a team to join or a project seeking help.
I dream of the days when the old “bulletin boards” where people used to ask for help to complete a program or join the ongoing project ! John
Hi guys, it’s been some time since posting Fakeflix some months ago!

I’m back here proud to present to you my latest project: Moodflix (Yeah, it could be a Fakeflix spin-off).

I’ve teamed up with my good friend Emanuele aka Kasuken: he’s a Microsoft MVP and he recently achieved the GitHub Star title .

Here’s our project repository: https://github.com/kasuken/Moodflix

We originally started this project with the purpose of participating in the Microsoft Azure Hackathon on DEV.to blog.
The project goal is to add special features to an existing list of movies: Imagine yourself at night, thinking about what movie to watch and no title comes to your mind. Well, that's exactly when Moodflix can help you in identifying the perfect movie for your night, based on your actual mood.
And after selecting your movie, Moodflix shows you all the movies reviews with their own mood icon. You can also get a global view at a glance to understand whether people have enjoyed it or not.

We truly hope you could like it and show some love by starring the project and following us on our GitHub profiles:

Th3Wall(me): https://github.com/Th3Wall

Kasuken: https://github.com/kasuken

Here you can find the demo link: https://moodflix.th3wall.codes

We can't wait to hear your feedback about it :)

Thanks for your time and see you soon...
> That's true for plain text (in the best case), but try extracting an equation, table or a diagram.

Good point. From what format are tables, diagrams, and formulas extractable (while retaining format)? I've had good luck moving tables between my web browser and email applications, though it always surprises me that the html is implemented similarly enough.

> PDFs in theory look the same everywhere, but turn into a mess on buggy implementations or differing rendering engines

I don't deal with PDFs programatically, and it sounds like you might, but from the user end, and from running networks of thousands of users, I've hardly ever seen problems in practice except for the browsers' JavaScript renderers.
Not in the past 5-10 years...
I am completely at a loss to what your referring to then.

I know of eviction moratoriums that occurred after covid. It was sold as a way to avoid a massive surge in displaced people from job loss.

At the time I thought it was strange that this was the best solution because as you said it put the cost on landlords which in my opinion hurts smaller landlords the most.

I don't really see what else could have been the cause but I guess I will rephrase:

- Why do you think this tool was used if not for Covid? (It was as least sold to the public that way right)

- Do you think now that it's been done once that it will happen again?
It is an absurd claim on its face. I don't think tests are perfect, nor have I seen anyone make the claim that they are. But, for example, when it comes to measuring the proficiency of different students in different classrooms being taught algebra by different teachers each with their own method and style of evaluation, there is simply no replacement for a standardized test.
I think most of the fear of the IRS comes from rumors like your post.

I think in reality, a way to get the “civilized country” (as referred to by another poster) tax experience is just file an incomplete return, the IRS will bill you the correct amount along with a negligible “fee” (interest) a few weeks or months later.

Maybe doing this repeatedly would upset the IRS, I don’t know. But it definitely works a few times without issue.

That said, I wouldn’t do this on purpose :)
Worlds first email chain letter? (1982)
They most likely have to do this as they scale in order to fund some of the moonshots they're looking at.
Yes. My time is highly valuable. As is my ISP pipe and my thought processing. Spam steals that, and you'll find no quarter with most tech folks because this is the societal default.
Thank you - that's very kind of you!
These random/urandom blocking/nonblocking discussions have been going on for at least a decade at this point, maybe even longer. I get that RNG algorithms are hard. What’s surprising to me is that it seems so hard to even figure out the desired interface of such a basic thing in the kernel. Security in entropy-starved environments seems to be very hard to square with backwards compatibility.
One of the emails read:

This is a chain letter which I received from Peter Baumbach a little while
ago. I know that all of you don't know me, but if you don't then you probably
know Bill "Wadd" Waddington, who was here helping me think of names to whom
to send this. This letter is the infamous ARPA-net chain letter which
caused much havoc a few years ago on the ARPA-net. I think that it's pretty
dead by now, but I just can't help but to send it along.
Theranos? Elon Musk? Silicon Valley and IT are full of hubris-based actors, successful or not.
Surely you mean fractional and not fractal?

I'm new to this but intuitively: The function is contiguous. Natural votes somehow behaving differently is what would be unexpected and need proof.
Why don't you ask people in any nation where this is already national policy, such as Austria? Don't just imply that it is not possible, when there are existence proofs.

For that matter, just ask your parents. It was national policy of the U.S. to build an overabundance of housing for the 50 years after the Great Depression, which is why landlords' income as a fraction of the national economy hit an all-time low in the mid 1980s. It has since rebounded to all-time highs, which is why nobody can find a place to live.
I remember asking for "the internet" one Christmas growing up and we ended up getting Compuserve. I recall learning the various local numbers you could dial into and our email address which was a randomly assigned number @compuserve.com.

Glad they took the time to preserve some of this stuff!
I believe you're after https://sr.ht/
You bring these things to their attention when you’re about to move out and tell them they just happened and are one of the factors on why you are deciding not to renew.
If you want to see an example, I took a screenshot[1] a week ago of the massive Intuit ad in Google Ads that blocks the results you may otherwise see.

1 https://twitter.com/frantzfries/status/1505942638704345094?s...
> These programs take advantage of families in very vulnerable times.

And yet, the majority of the kids there are placed there by CPS, not by parents.
Also posted in Oct 2020[0] with 175 points, 119 comments.. some useful comments, including some privacy fears

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812
> This would indicate that Amazon has some kind of internal interface for these Emergency Data Requests for law enforcement that just dumps all the data to them immediately without all those barriers to access.

If they scratch the government's back, chances are the government will scratch Amazon's back, too.

> Makes one wonder why that's not also available to Amazon users?

There's a benefit to giving law enforcement whatever they want, but little to no benefit to giving users the freedom to move their data out of Amazon's walled garden.

Amazon is the same company that is creating partnerships with law enforcement agencies all over the country with their Ring products and surveillance network[1][2].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258856/amazon-ring-part...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/amazon-ring-must-end-i...
>unhinged
>Sure bud, we are all white men with colonial baggage on this website.

I guess some people live for the sigma but die from the ligma.
The Computer History Museum is such an amazing place and I try to visit it every single time I'm in the Valley and I always see something new.

This might be the first time there's just a tiny, tiny piece of my online history there. Bought my first computer with a modem just so I could join CompuServe in 1984. My phone bill in the tiny town I lived in at the time was the only thing limiting me from spending every waking moment on CompuServe.
No, I want the search engines results to filter out websites that use ads or maybe even websites that use javascript.
Rent controlled apartments are great for people who live in them. They are less good for everyone else.
I left my job in August last year and set a target to complete a project every month of 2022! PlotPanel.com was my February project, I launched it around the 25th (so around 24 days). It's deployed using containers and a VPS!
> need to be part of this transaction at all

Because Capitalism, in essence, is the optimization of one particular group’s ability to alter how people live their lives in a way that transfers the most wealth from the working class.

America’s economy is a house of cards built around financial middlemen.
Insurrection is an absurdly inaccurate and hyperbolic term to refer to this crowd of misfits and deluded group of people. If you tried to destroy the planet by jumping up and down nobody intelligent would describe your antics as attempted planetary destruction no matter how devout your intent.
That's what I think of too.

> So much for ego being a new thing and cherry picking how in olden times things were better.

I never said ego was a new thing, or that all of history was better. In fact, I chose the post-war period - whose culture, I would guess, was partly a reaction to the fascist ideology (or any ideology).
What are some examples of where types have saved you? I mean, I can imagine some, but are there any good blog posts or have an example yourself?

I've moved on from Ruby to Elixir and we use typespecs at my current job, but I still never do in any of my own code. Elixir does have a way to do type hinting which I do use and appreciate when appropriate. So I'm not "against" types and like the idea in theory, but I've never really felt the pain.

The most tangible argument I've bought is that types help out in a huge codebase. I can definitely see this. This is really solving a social problem, of course, because on smaller teams, it's much easier to enforce coding standards, especially if you follow XP and pair all the time. For example, in large dynamic codebases I've worked on, calling something `object` when it really means `object_id` would never fly. Variables and functions always have to be full words describing exactly what they do. Functions are only ever allowed to return one type. And of course everything is thoroughly tested. Of course I understand that not all these things are practiced everywhere and nor do they need to be. But for me that has always made for incredibly readable code.

I'm writing this just to give the perspective of a dynamic weenie and maybe looking to be convinced a little more? I also know three incredibly good programmers with 20-50 years experience each who all wrote in typed languages for years and then couldn't be happier not to have types when they moved to Ruby. So ya, I dunno what I'm expecting here, but mostly offering my perspective.

But the TL;DR: if I join your team and you want me to use types, I'll do it! But I really feel there are ways around it but those ways may not be for everyone (and sometimes perhaps impractical).

hmmm, I dunno, this was longer than I meant it to be, haha.
Even if you toss in a 1099 or two taxes are still mostly straightforward. I’ve always had mine done but it’s mostly only in the last ten years or so that they’ve gotten genuinely complicated.
Profit Sharing (2020)
it's sad that issues like this which are widely known and affect many content creators doesn't get any attention until a big company decides to make a stink.
I hate to tell someone with a solution they're happy with to change, but consider firefox. It lets you customize your toolbar and remove/add/resize whatever you want, and anything you still want access to but don't want to be immediately visible you can throw into the overflow menu so you can still get a dropdown with all of them but only have one symbol in your toolbar the rest of the time.