skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mostly, the page description language (inside PDFs) says "move to point (x, y) and write text foo" or "move to point (x, y) and draw glyph bar".

The reason that many PDFs produce garbage when extracting text is because the underlying document doesn't include fonts, every letter is a drawn glyph. This is most common in older (1990s) pdfs generated on UNIX systems.

Since the page description language is saying "write text foo", that text is broken up by the generating software, so there is not necessarily a whole line of text as a human would see it.

And some PDFs are impossible to extract text from because they've flattened the page into an image. Law firms are notorious for doing this - to provide the documents exactly as required/specified during discovery, but make them impossible for the text to be extracted. Basically it is a fax - every page is a TIFF image (because it is harder to OCR than a JPEG, although JBIG2 has its own flaws [0]).

I've been working with PDF projects off and on since the late 90s. The standard tries to be everything for everybody and that makes it a Charlie Foxtrot from top to bottom (if you've ever written an object viewer/editor to dig inside PDFs, you know exactly what I'm referring to). It is a great spec for making a document that appears the same no matter where it is viewed or printed. But I always treat it as a sausage: you can turn the cow into a sausage, but you can't turn that sausage back into a cow.

0 - https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...
Actually in many ways the Russian army today is vastly superior to the one they had 2 years ago. They use drones, they have better comms (as in actual encrypted radios and not cell phones stolen from civilians), they don't concentrate people and munition in one place, they don't attack with columns of tanks and troop transporters (vulnerable to Bayraktars and Javelins) and so on.
I briefly joined some F-Droid Dev rooms in hopes of helping with their speed/capacity issues by chasing some CDN sponsorships or expanding the mirror list, however the possibility that any commercial provider or user-provided mirror might have access logs enabled was enough to end the conversation. I 180'd after that. Never was a community-run project IME.
No, it doesn't, unless you think someone would buy it to use as wallpaper or something.

That's why Confederate money immediately became worthless after the Civil War ended.
At least it's a good example of how to write a great clickbate title for hacker news ;)
I think that's a great point: that Drupal gave you a whole car, while today's JS gives you five incompatible wheels, thirteen colors of duct tape, and three fragile shells to put over them. Drupal had a lot of really strong (as in idiomatic and enforced) patterns that didn't let you take dirty shortcuts. As much as I hated it, it was solid engineering. (I'd consider it overengineered, but that's only cuz I'm coming from the opposite extreme... Frontpage and Dreamweaver).

That was probably also its downfall. It had a huge learning curve (same as Angular's downfall). And it didn't make for easy division of labor, and there was no quick and dirty way to do anything. The reason why there are so many Drupal consultants is because it takes so much manpower and brainspace to understand how Drupal is architected. With a headless CMS, the schema admin, the content editors, and frontend devs could each do their jobs independently without stepping on everyone else's toes. It's not as complete as a majestic monolith but each person's job was a lot easier, and way more isolated and safe.

Drupal tried to be everything for everyone, and in the end it was just too much for any one normal person. It's what happens when engineers design products for people who aren't like them.
They've been at this for a while, I got one in Sept 2022

"Saw your profile on HN and we think your skills look like a good fit for our team"

If it had been "we saw you are engaged on hacker news" instead of "we saw your profile" I might have actually responded. I don't have a profile on this site. I have a barely reputable profile, and I'm lucky when my engagement is received positively.

It's like when I get spam images from thirsty IG bots, NOBODY ever talks to me like that. Even if they did, the context / content of what they say immediately tells me whether this is a scripted interaction or genuine. When you are at the depths of despair it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to have a properly calibrated bullshit detector and you will fall for seemingly "easy to see" things like this.

I agree with the other posters, it's less than optimal. I'm lucky to be on the greener side of the grass today but I can see why others responded more hostile.
i hope so too!
Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.
As someone who retired after 22 years in the US Military:

Because the toll that way of life takes on your body is at least a magnitude more than most civilians realize.

Years of little sleep in poor condition while under constant low level stress, being in unfamiliar conditions where you never quite feel safe sleeping, constant interruptions because the military activities don't stop while YOU sleep, poor temperature control (hot or cold), poor hygiene availability, poor sleeping surfaces, odd work schedules, short sleeping schedules...

Those are just the factors that you deal with for decades that relate to sleep. I wasn't a grunt; I did do a lot of move fast and don't break things or people die stuff (Nuclear Power, SAR Aviation, Amphibious Operations) and that was just how life was.

We had a few overweight people, but they were the exception. Those of us who were more senior were just all broken in so many ways. I don't THINK I have sleep apnea, but I do have trouble sleeping from the pain I'm in every night from a back injury and multiple autoimmune issues that cause flareups and pain.

The cost on those that serve is absolutely astounding. I don't recommend service to anyone.
The best strategy is to flood the market with oil, causing oil prices to crash and dictators to go bankrupt, but America is unwilling to do that.
Yes. Thank you for reading. :) It's aged a bit but I am working on an update for the cloud era: https://carlos.bueno.org/2023/03/aws-dismal-guide.html
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I’ve thought for a long while that using OpenAI on things that touch internal infra/data components is closing off a huge potential market. I’ve had a few people on the cutting edge of AI tell me that the risk profile is acceptable for a lot of companies, but I’m extremely skeptical that’s the case based on my own experience building cloud and data infra SaaS. Corps want self hosted solutions for their most critical components. I might be proven wrong, but the people who are telling me I’m wrong often have a vested interest in that not being true (building some SaaS product where the only way hockey stick growth the VC’s want can be achieved is by putting the eggs in the cloud basket)
BI page is a short summary of the New Yorker article, we could change the link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/11/the-inside-sto...
Software projects have portability; you spend X amount of time, and others can use your labor for free or nearly free.

In comparison, hardware projects have costs even if the 'hard work' is done: PCBs to buy, components to assemble, parts to purchase. Even BEST case here, and discounting peoples time, it looks like the cost of all the components listed would be in the neighborhood of $200. And that assumes you can source the same 'demo' cable that the OP purchased for the same cheap price. Realistically I bet actual costs would be $300+

I have nothing against DIY hardware projects, the problem is that hardware projects must pass a much higher bar: you have to be cost competitive at a minimum with existing products on the market, or you need to be better in some way (and, that way can be trivial, as long as it's interesting). This appears to be neither.
Does it turn into rusted out rubble in 100 years like the reinforced concrete we use today?

I remember reading an article about the longevity of Roman concrete. The best they could come up with was the use of volcanic ash and much slower curing in salt water.
For anybody close to the topic and knowing how shocked the Israeli society was on Oct 7th, this paper makes a very strong claim that needs more than just circumstantial evidence (higher short trades). Like any circumstantial evidence, many reasons could trigger unusual trading patterns
> The tropes seem strongly tied to the rationality and EA communities, so maybe if one is part of those communities there is more to the satire?

Rationality community is where you'd expect to find some spreadsheet people. So if this story is in any way related, it would be an unsuccessful attempt at mocking them.
From what I've read, even Hamas' own leaders were unaware of the Oct 7 attack planning. Maybe the Israeli equivalent of the SEC can figure out who placed these trades.
Even if not correlated, this is diabolically genius for all state sponsors and financiers of terrorism.
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> People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is incontrovertible.

That people are better off now than 15–20 years ago (see OP) is absolutely not obvious.

> What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers.

Uh, see the Neoliberal shift that happened some decades ago. Things got worse. The rich got richer and the rest got poorer.

This isn’t some psyche thing for crying in the sink.
This is no longer the case as of a year or two ago; they lowered it quite a bit. Even then it was quite hard to fake it; it just encouraged everyone to get tested.
Does Duke receive substantial public funding? Is Duke using this funding to force their political views on others? Seems wrong.
The article addresses this point of view repeatedly.

We aren't where we were in the 60's, much progress has been made. How much time until something is commercially viable remains to be seen.
Yep, and already discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38486394
"Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness later"
Well what direction was the unusual way?
Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.
Do you pick your hammer and wrench based off what color it is or how well it performs for the cost?

When things become price optimized, there really is little left to differ on because of the physics of cars, much like the physics of hammers and wrenches.
I’ve only heard the term “Layoff” in regards to a temporary staff reduction in the trades/blue collar/seasonal work. In white collar jobs, layoff has pretty much always meant a permanent staff reduction.
Not sure what you settings you used, but I never was able to achieve above ~500Mbit even with everything disabled.

The other thing I noticed: you literally cannot access or use the management UI when you're saturating the connection. It just straight up will not load.
Sorry, I am not trying to sell anything. I am not OP or parent poster.

If you want to hear about stories of privilege escalation there should be easy to find. I also have some on my own which I might describe in another post but essentially it was the classic - CI/CD pipeline that "thinks" it has access only to QA does a "destroy all servers" in both QA and Production because it also had access to production without knowing anything about it.
I assume this is about Anki, but even for archive it goes to 404 for me.
The predictions not long ago were "30 years out" so that sound like progress.
I'm confused - you posted in the "who wants to be hired" thread, and then got an email from this company asking if you'd be interested?
That’s much
Who says it's going to be encrypted? The service provider may screw up in more ways than one...

The data that may be plausibly stolen from me alone doesn't have a lot of impact if I'm the only victim. It starts to matter a lot more if it's stolen as a part of a larger heist. Eg. if someone knows I'm saving money to buy a particular brand of car, then it doesn't matter really, but if someone knows that among a million people 3KK want to buy that particular make, they may have a valuable insight about making investments into car manufacturing industry. Of course this isn't limited to cars and investments. Suppose, someone stealing data discovers a trend in health problems which would increase demand for a certain drug... same idea.
If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap.

I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future.

I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.
Not sure if it's diabolical genius, it was literally the opening plot point of the bond film Casino Royale
I'm conflicted by your comment. Against Ukraine's army ? Absolutely, you're right. Against a modern 2023 western army ? Their loss in equipment downgraded them severely.
The oldest buildings in the world[0] are as old as they are because they use materials with lifespans of much less than 100 years. Instead they make them modular. Make it so that you can take out parts of the building to replace them without collapsing the whole thing. Instead we build our buildings in such a way that makes maintenance very hard and costly. We prefer to pretend like our buildings will last forever rather than actually plan for the inevitable degradation

There's small scale movements towards changing this. Some cities are specifically building buildings in a way that makes them modular and reusable[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230207-can-we-design-ci...
Unions in the Software Industry?
Are any software engineers out there part of a union?

I find it strange that I have never heard of unionising in my 15 years as a professional software engineer.

I'm concerned that the cause is that we've had it so good for so long as an industry that it's never been a priority. We've never needed collective bargaining in order to get good working conditions and salaries.

We shouldn't take that for granted. Take a look at Amazon as an example. I imagine the working conditions and benefits at AWS are pretty amazing. Compare that to the people who are working in the warehouses. It's the same company - the AWS people are only treated well because the market for software engineers is more competitive than the market for warehouse operators.

What's going to happen as the market becomes less competitive and corporations don't have to treat us well anymore? I feel like we will be very atomised and unable to fight back.
Are we really still pretending this is because of the pandemic?
>things like tobacco have been successfully restricted in the past

At least in the US do you have any idea how long that battle took and how directly the tobacco companies lied to everyone and paid off politicians? Tobacco setup the handbook for corporations lying to their users in long expensive battles. If AI turns out to be highly dangerous we'll all be long dead as the corporate lawyers fill draw it out in court for decades.
Foxconn's empty buildings/factories/promises in Wisconsin (2020)
It's not just that, most of us are knowledge workers, think about how many hours off the clock you spent trying to solve some business problem. Why aren't you enjoying your kid's soccer game and instead thinking about that problem at work? To make your upcoming work day easier, or is it because you're spending many many more hours on the clock actually, working for your employer?

When employers wanted your body, it was a lot easier to have separation between work and home life, but now that employers want your mind, that separation is incredibly illdefined for most of us I think. I used to give that time freely but now I wonder what's the point.
Wonder if Kagi's universal summarizer would work on recipe videos. It seems to do a decent job on YouTube videos, but those usually have cc built in.
> Would the differences in binary sizes be prohibitive for use on the internet?

No. They are competitive. For one of my benchmarks I get a WASM blob that is 90KB, and for my VM I get 76KB. (Both are stripped of any debug info.)
Is there any replication of a transformer, GPT, LLM using "hivekit"? If not they should aim at that first.
it’s not, the instruction manual exists for decades if you like conspiracies.
Are you referring to the ~4 grams of palladium/platinum in a catalytic converter? That does not seem comparable to the many kilograms of cobalt/rare-earths in an EV.

And have you recanted the statement that ICE cars use cobalt and rare-earths anywhere near as much as electrics do?

> Almost every purchase of a used car causes a new car to be built & sold.

No, the only cause of a new car being built and sold is an individual deciding that a new car is a good choice for them. Them selling their old car is a result of that same decision, not a cause. And that decision comes more and more nowadays from a misguided impression that "my old car is bad for the environment, I must buy a new environmentally friendly one to be a good person".
more than that
Exactly. Fiddling with your phone over and over again while your hands are wet/covered in flour etc. A paper sheet you can pin to the fridge or just get dirty is a reasonable solution imo.
No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let’s assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year. 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 - 10000 employees, let’s round up and say 10,000 employees. If they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies.

At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.
> none of us are irreplaceable

But the smart ones know now to be as irreplaceable as possible, however they have to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26638703

I specifically cite this comment because of the "naughtiness" topic, but also feel dang's context is important. "naughtiness" and "pg" keywords in the search brings up lots on the topic for those who want to dive deep.

https://techcrunch.com/2011/05/24/y-combinators-paul-graham-... ("Y Combinator's Paul Graham: We're Looking For People Like Us")

> Another key factor: Naughtiness. “Startups often have to do slightly devious things,” Graham says. “You can tell if people have a gleam in their eye. You don’t want people who would be obedient employees… we’re not looking for people who did what they were told in life.”

(I have no strong opinion on the topic; YC's job is to obtain VC asset class returns telling founders they are special and to grind people and markets until liquidity or failure, but dang is nice and effective for keeping this third space decent and vibrant)
I think this is somewhat restrictive. A significant amount of scientific computing work is done in high-level languages like Python that dispatch to lower-level kernels (like C++, jitted Numba, etc). I wouldn't discount them as "not scientific computing". The jitted kernels really blur the line, of course, because in many cases the jitted code runs in the same environment as the higher-level language.
Thanks, this was interesting.
Lua is very weak for "programming in the large". It's just a little bit better than early JavaScript. Scripts are OK, but anything that requires more code with more structure requires incredible amounts of perseverance and discipline from all contributors. You can do fairly large programs in Lua as a small team of highly skilled hackers, but the barrier to entry will be much higher than if you did it in a language that offers ready-made abstractions.

I use AwesomeWM, which is basically Emacs of Window Managers, with Lua instead of Elisp. The code is very well written and documented, yet getting into it is much more complicated than if it was written in Python - even if that Python was written poorly.
There's a new "conspiracy theory" on the block to explain this and other events (I do admittedly find it plausible):

It's not like Israel has been, or is, a friend of Gaza. So when Gaza was planning the attack, either Israel's previously famous intelligence service was caught completely off guard (despite the warning by Egypt) - or they let it happen, intentionally, as an excuse to raid Gaza as well as improve the popularity of their struggling president.

Thoughts?

(Edit: For those questioning how this would improve the prime minister's or president's approval, few things improve the popularity of a president, or a prime minister, than a declaration of war following a catastrophic event. Bush reached 86% popular support after 9/11.)
These trades were done in US exchanges and would fall under SEC. But considering they didn't investigate all the shorts before 9/11 it's doubtful they'll do much here.