skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Netherlands is mentioned once with a link another article. If its greenhouse technology is so good, were there any viable innovations building upon their success? There seems to be a lot of informed, quality discussion by HNers, are any knowledge of the Netherlands situation?
I’m going to give up Mathing it out as I’m confused now and it was cherries anyway
That's why you just cherry pick the data to fit the narrative you like of course

/s
Per ChatGPT summarizing the OP:

The author received an email from Google stating that their account had been permanently suspended due to violating Google policies. The author had created a second Google Ads account as a risk management strategy to ensure their main account could continue running if it received a violation. However, they were unaware that creating multiple Google Ads accounts is against policy and was subsequently banned from advertising on Google for life. The author had been working with Google account managers to prepare for launching in Germany but accidentally added the wrong domain to an ad, resulting in their main account being suspended again.

The author expressed frustration with Google's policy enforcement and loss of faith in the company, despite being a legitimate eco-friendly product seller with trademarks and in-house inventory. The author shared their story as a cautionary tale to others who may consider creating multiple Google Ads accounts.
Now that more and more cameras use AI models to detect and infer things in real time, wonder if a very specific adversarial t-shirt could render the wearer completely invisible to the AI (not to humans looking at the CCTV monitors or the video recordings). I think William Gibson wrote something like that in the Zero History book, "the ugliest t-shirt in the world" or something
Ask HN: State of the art in document data extraction
What is the state of the art in document data extraction?

I used to run a side-project which turned PDFs into data. It started as a bit of client work back in 2013 (Scala + PDFBox, with thousands of PDFs with the same layout needing to be parsed) and evolved over the years to be a general-purpose data extractor, with a focus on tabular data (with the help of a PhD computer vision expert, lots of deep learning + ML; up to 2018).

It was during 2018 when my PDF project got me head-hunted for a consultation gig to build a receipt scanner for a large UK customer data science company. The CTO suggested we use Google Vision, and it was quite easy to use the provided bounding boxes for paragraphs/sentences/words/letters to isolate rows/columns. When I revisited my own project after this gig, I threw a lot of my old code away, because Google Vision clever isolation of sections did all the heaviest lifting.

I'm curious to know if anyone else works in this field, what tools you use (e.g. Adobe PDF Extract, Google Document AI, etc), and what types of problems you're trying to solve.
> ...If you notice that the docs are bad, the product is bad...

This right here is so correct! Given the option of 2 (or more) products/services, in my mind, the one with the best documentaiton wins...because it usually means it is the option that is more easy to implement...or at least i can research how to make it the esier option to implement, etc. Good docs for the win!
(1) You're looking at images in the dry season. When it rains all those white river shaped things turn into rivers that you can float logs down. That gets the logs to the fork.

(2) When the waters recede a bit you take the logs upstream. You don't walk in the arroyo. You use a pole like this:

https://catbirdinchina.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/p5315645....

You can move at more or less walking speed with a pole like that.

>What are your examples showing that your proposed transport method is at least as feasible as using tumplines?

This isn't a theoretical thing. People still move goods around like in places that are too poor to afford motor boats. I've seen it first hand in Myanmar and Vietnam. As long as the current is relatively weak it's easy to move a boat by pole.

Stack a bunch of logs together onto a raft and have a couple guys on top with poles to move it. Bet they could do a raft of 30-40 at something around walking speed.

>How deep do you think that water was on July 23? Those are backpacks on the bank, and it looks narrow enough to step across. So, perhaps a few inches? Likely not enven a foot.

You don't need much more than a few inches to float logs. Either way, there's some point between those two photos where the trade off between river depth and current is optimal.

>In the history of humanity, how many people have floated massive numbers of logs upstream without animal or sail power? All the examples I can think of went downriver.

How many examples are there of them choosing to carry heavy stuff when water transport was available?
Microbial “lions” that nibble prey to death form new branch on the tree of life
Lol no worries. More realistic would be 50-200 apple, or 500-1000 cherry depending on rootstock, variety, and the density you can support.
> We were also allowed to keep up to 6 hens which were enough to keep two people in eggs and provided excellent compost.

About how many eggs per week or month was that producing? We're allowed a certain amount of chickens, and I have considered it. What was the maintenance like?
I'd read this with some interest, but if this citation in the introduction is correct then it's not a small deal.

"Toxoplasma gondii, the parasitic protozoon of cats, infects about one-third of the human population in both developed and developing countries (Tenter et al., 2000)."
I suspect that quite a few subscription-based companies are going to have a hard time. They have no realistic alternative revenue models so they might fail.

However, consumer-facing subscription models are not the majority of the tech sector. Most tech companies have other ways of making money, and the tech sector as a whole will be fine.
Simple solution: feed the image to http://github.com/csdvrx/derasterize

(You may need to edit the characters supported to recognize things like the spades, diamonds and hearts I see on the page)

> So then we can loop over every permutation of background color, foreground color, and character and compare it to the image’s character and pick the one that has the lowest number of mismatched pixels - ideally 0.

This is also the technique used in derasterize, even if we wanted to try funnier things, like a Hough transform to spots the circles (application: a bloom-filter like approach to try the things like ° o O just right where they are needed) or a FFT to isolate zones by grainyness and apply different criterias for a more perceptive approach (application: the Sixel lemur example has fine hair, very thin in pixels but important to keep if the pixels create a line of high intensity given the background color)
You can still import fully qualified static method on a class:

import someclass.doThing;

Or maybe that's what you meant by somewhat :)
Are you sure it was drivers issue? Not HW fault?
I have good memories of Win2003 (and XP too)
Very stable system, if drivers are correctly written.

Back in the days I remember fighting with random BSODs on Audio play/stop
on Win2003. After months of fights I nailed that bloody .sys audio driver
that gave me the problems. Found orginal vendor simpler driver and problem went away.
To be fair, it doesn't run well, or sometimes at all, on Windows
There’s a definite niche in the $5-50 a month range where people can buy b2b software rentals that help their job without much paperwork.

But once you hit consumer signups or bigger prices it gets much harder.
This is Google we're talking about, where you can only talk to robots.
Awesome work! Congrats on the launch.
> Can you elaborate on what, exactly, you strongly disagree with? I believe you, but I am curious as to which part, specifically, made you say.. "um, I am not touching that with a 10 foot pole".

No, there is no reason for me to tell you if you don't have an idea already. Maybe he Tweeted about how foie gras is so amazing, and I am an animal lover.

It doesn't really matter; and leads to a ton of unnecessary small arguments which I'd rather avoid being drawn into.
They still couldn't even get the comms clear on this point.
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.

The task for each worker in the industrial age was to discover how to do his job better: that’s productivity. Frederick Taylor revolutionized industry by using his scientific method to optimize mechanical work. But in the network economy, where machines do most of the inhumane work of manufacturing, the question for each worker is not “How do I do this job right?” but “What is the right job to do?”

Answering this question is, of course, extremely hard to do. It’s called an executive function. In the past, only the top 10% of the workforce was expected to make such decisions. Now, everyone, not just executives, must decide what is the right next thing to do.
Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!
I think they scaled it down to the actual size of the market which is pretty small and that might look like what you're saying.
i am not sure about the "update lifespan ruining the phone's longevity" point. people never held the same standards for dumb phones with little to no software revisions.

i get that android is infested with malware. however, if people, even companies, can choose to stick with older versions of windows despite going out of support, regular folk who don't install random apps should have no issues with this.

also, not to disregard potential community rom support if this takes off.
Instead of mirrors, I wonder if it would make sense to have greenhouses with artificial lights for winter and night. The original vertical farming idea was farms in buildings in the city. It has changed to focus on premium greens year round.

To solve the year round garden problem, it would be better to grow them in enhanced greenhouses. Then could use sunlight when available and LEDs the rest of the time for decrease in costs and increase in efficiency. There would be no improvement in land usage but even big cities have empty land nearby. I sort of think current vertical farming pivoted when original idea didn't work, but there is better way to do the pivot.
> I don't like Python. But it is difficult for me to look past the empirical evidence that it is (a) remarkably easy for new programmers to pick up, and (b) an extraordinarily popoular, load-bearing tool for actual practitioners in the field.

I pretty much agree with all of this. I don't love Python from a PL nerd perspective, because of its weird hostility to functional programming and proper lexical scoping. But when people ask me what language to learn as a beginner, I always say Python. Empirically it's in the sweet spot of both being easy to pick up and practical enough that people can start out making useful things.

I also agree that you shouldn't teach Rust as a first language. You shouldn't teach any typed language, honestly--types just complicate things before you learn what they're for, which only hands-on experience will teach you.
Archive to Fravia’s website

Wow.

https://www.richardharrison.pro/fravia/
"Biggest Fraud in German History" -> would be careful with that bit of hyperbole ...
Whenever you have a question of this sort, it's important to note that:

1. I personally don't like XYZ

2. My echo chamber doesn't like XYZ

3. Consumers at large don't like XYZ

4. XYZ will be the death of a company or the industry or the economy

are all very different realities. In this particular case, I'm pretty confident in saying that it is actually 1 & 2. The tech sector will be just fine.
I know lots of people complain about subscription but for most services this seems a realistic pricing based onto the fact these services have recurring costs in the form of infra, maintenance, employees?

On the other end the service is providing you recurring value otherwise you would just drop it.
They won't, and so it's not very useful
thanks for providing those sources, but I still think it's important to acknowledge that the claims you made are heavily disputed

what you stated were your conclusions (which may or may not be true):

- that the dossier was paid opposition research is not disputed, what is disputed is the veracity of its contents. Nothing in the link you shared suggests it was confirmed fake. In fact, many of the claims made in the dossier have been corroborated by subsequent investigations.

- On the other hand, while the the Hunter Biden laptop (also opposition research) has been authenticated, the veracity of the claims made about it are still in question, and many media outlets declined to run the story due to a lack of supporting evidence.

- Another difference to highlight is that Christopher Steele was an experienced professional who followed standard journalistic practices to protect his sources, etc., whereas Rudy Giuliani's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop (to put it very lightly) has been criticized as unprofessional and lacking in evidence.

- I'm not saying that bias in media coverage doesn't exist, but news organizations have a responsibility to verify stories with evidence before publishing them. It's also worth noting that the burden of proof is higher for claims that are "difficult to verify, yet easy to fake" (So it's not surprising that some stories are given more attention than others depending on the strength of the evidence supporting them)
Forces due to a dipole effect (like magnetism) fall off like 1/r^3, while the strong nuclear force is exp(-x). There might be some analogy between the two in some sort of unification theory, but the power law suggests that it's fundamentally an unrelated phenomenon to me.
It's a parallel list comprehension, as linked from the wiki page you referenced: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.4.4/docs/users_guide/ext...
Thinking about it in terms of graph theory helps. Society is generally much more connected due to social media and dating apps. Even if there are proportionally the same percentage of highly desirable guys, those guys are now much more accessible to females.
The impingement service was an after market addon.
I also saw this and was disappointed about it. He said it multiple times, "20fps, it's not a problem" when it clearly is a problem
The reason for the long-tail bets being improbable is important, though!

If the reason is because it takes lots of capital, or because there are network effects (e.g., AirBnB, eBay), or because it's a winner takes all market, or some key piece of technology has to be proven out, then sure, shoot your shot, someone will get the bullseye and win the day and it'll be a cakewalk raising the next fund.

But if it's improbable because nobody wants it, that's not the same thing.

That's why a bet being improbable should not be the reason to invest in something.

A VC may look at a bet and say, "sure, the win condition is unlikely, but lots of people will want this, so if it wins, it's worth billions." And maybe they write a check.

But if another VC looks at a deal and says "it's not likely to work, and also, even in the optimistic case this is worse than existing solutions," then there is no market problem being solved. This second VC will likely be leaning more on their management fee than their carry to pay the mooring fees for their yacht.

And a phone call to that farmer would have told them that while microgreens don't ship well over very long distances, they do fine in climate controlled trucks over a couple hundred miles. Part of a VC's job is to de-risk investment decisions by validating key assumptions.
> Subscriptions are great model.

Not for the user.

I give $0/yr to digital subscription services with zero marginal reproduction cost (SaaS, video, etc.) and somewhere in the range of $250-1000/yr for pay-to-own software.

Reasons:

1. Pay-to-own software is almost universally of a higher quality than rental software

2. I want to host my own software and data, so I'm not instantly screwed if the software company goes under or unilaterally decides to change the way they do business

3. Subscription management is a pain in the ass (in terms of the effort required to track down subscriptions, cancel them, make sure you aren't still getting charged, etc.) whereas pay-to-own requires close to zero mental overhead

The primary risk with pay-to-own software is that it stops being maintained and the OS APIs the software uses gradually go out of date, but this is much easier to address than the corresponding risk for rental software: that the company folds or the product gets cancelled, and you lose everything instantly!
This the reason why I didn't sign up for KDP Select for the books I self published. You're effectively giving your copyright to Amazon.

Since I didn't I can still give free copies to anyone I want, because I'm the copyright owner.
In isolated cases companies can reduce costs by self hosting. Usually this is a combination of very specialized requirements or shockingly technically competent early employees or founders.

However even in these exceptional cases there are hidden costs that will likely arise.

For most companies the very concept of self hosting is comical. This is a one way train.
It's also been one of the wealthiest parts of the world since Roman times.
Brings to mind the Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame), which uses only the 1,000 most-common English words.

EDIT: And its online example Up Goer Five: https://xkcd.com/1133/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer
And if customers are unwilling to pay more than a nominal fee for one-time purchase software.
> However, they weren't even bringing enough value without subscription or with ads

This value is objective? Therein lies the issue with this argument. For some people, a spam blocking app is a waste of $2/mo. For another person, it saves them a ton of headache. I'm currently subscribed to 12 apps on my iPhone and I have 20 others that I let expire over the past year - I pay for them because I enjoy them and would like to support the developers and to continue using them. I have a ton of paid apps from years past that are now just junk, because the $5 the developer charged 10 years ago couldn't support development for 10 years of service. Subscriptions are the answer to that problem.

Subscriptions will naturally go away if they don't work, but that also means those services/products go away as well.

Also where is this data on flattening subscriber growth that you have access to?
That's hilarious. Like what you said, that's really amazing about how small changes propagate. It's crazy how wildlife finds stuff. They know what they're doing.
GTA: San Andreas-styled supermarket in Lviv, Ukraine (2020)
Subscriptions do somewhat align developer and user interests. But it somewhat depends on the application. Some small utility that I use for some task a few times a year? I'll be pretty dis-inclined to buy a subscription for that. Something that's a core part of my workflow (or that I generally get regular utility from)? I'm much more open to a subscription--depending on the pricing of course.
> As soon as you require qualifications to help, you’ve now effectively outlawed good samaritans.

Every Good Samaritan law I know of specifically says that we avoid punishing people trying to help provided they weren't trying to benefit. Try to help someone and make a mistake? Generally, AIUI (IANAL) you're unlikely to be held liable. Offer to help if they pay you and mess up? You get to be liable. Showing ads is a profit motive; if YT wants to be a Good Samaritan they can do it without ads.

Disclaimer: IANAL so I could be wrong about the legal bits, but I think the ethical basis works.
https://output.jsbin.com/nikoxod/26/

Just need to head over to redbubble now.
Interesting. Thank you for sharing your work.
Related: "Subscription fatigue and related musings" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34949683
Reminder that RISC/CISC are labels placed upon an ISA (the software-hardware interface).

The microarchitecture (how the CPU is internally designed, how it executes instructions) is irrelevant to RISC vs CISC.
> People are bad at Git, people don't want to read the Git book to understand Git, so for long time many people's workflow was "type quesion on how to do something in git into google and copy-paste first answer" (which generally worked).

Should we really trust Google's search AI, which is also always under attack by SEO spam, to give reliable results?

I have about as much trust in Google's result page as in ChatGPT responses. I don't trust Google to give me exactly what I'm really looking for, so I force myself to look for a number of sources which corroborate a claim.

I am increasingly considering self-hosting a YaCy instance configured with a curated whitelist of allowed domains (in this case, I might add the GitHub docs and/or the Atlassian git docs pages to be certain that I'm reading valid and up-to-date instructions when searching for git-related topics).
> What? No. NoSQLs don't help with joins, as they don't have them at all. Meaning every "join-like" has to be client side and entails transmitting stuff to the client, which is even worse than temporary tables.

I have worked with two NoSQL databases and both have support for basic joins. Not that it's needed very often.

https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/reference/operator/aggre...

https://www.arangodb.com/docs/stable/aql/examples-join.html