skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PrivatePDF – minimal PDF editor that runs in the browser
I created this tool to make it quick and easy to sign PDF contracts, without having to deal with installing additional software and without worrying that my PDFs will get uploaded to a third party.

It supports the bare minimum for my most common usecases. It is not intended to be a full-featured PDF editor. Features include filling PDF forms, inserting images and text, and rotating PDFs.

Check it out by either picking a PDF of your own - https://photown.github.io/private-pdf/, or with a preloaded sample PDF - https://photown.github.io/private-pdf/?pdf=https://raw.githu....

In terms of tech stack, it's written in TypeScript, bundled with Webpack. For PDF rendering and editing I used PDF.js and pdf-lib respectively.
We don’t need human-like intelligence in a box for a tool to be useful,
But human-like intelligence is what many companies are spending billions to try and achieve
Strangely, yes. I can't find a good source for you at present but I've known people who self-medicated this way and it seemed to work for them.

But GP probably meant nicotine.
> (Side note: Had to read Anathem multiple times to really get the novel, but it was worth the investment to me.)

Same here, and probably true of most readers.
I'm glad Figma is around now, but yeah, the creative authoring experience is really sad these days. We don't even have a modern equivalent to Dreamweaver or Frontpage anymore :/
Scholars asked Harvard President Claudine Gay for her data. She said no.
Ask HN: Would you share something you have made, even if it doesn't earn money?
The article seems to be a lead in for promoting Blockchain and Web 3 stuff. :(
> Shouldn't browsers update themselves these days?

Looking over the shoulder of a user who’s fairly savvy—but doesn’t understand just how horrifying browser security is—revealed at least one pitfall to me: an update needs a restart of the browser, and a prompt to restart appears specifically when the user turns to the browser, presumably, in order to use it, that is, at the worst possible moment. As a result, it gets postponed indefinitely.

(Forced restarts when the browser thinks you’re not using it are also a bad idea for reasons that are hopefully obvious to anybody who’s used a modern version of Windows. That is not even counting the general vibe of knowing better than the user what they want, which I just instinctively dislike.)
There is some truth in that, but if you only spend 1 month on a project it will be really difficult to realize any potential there might be.

It shouldn't be about the time spend but how quickly you can validate assumptions, those are different things.

My point is: It's not "that easy". I'm pro indie hacking, but it's hard work and difficult to create a profitable business that you can live off. Spinning off crappy quick projects only works if you have a big audience you can sell to, and most don't have that, so they will have to put in a lot more effort and time.
The Modern Loss Guide to Going Back to Work When You're Grieving
Against Math: Kuratowski's Spectre
It's surely way more cringe to be clueless about something while bragging about one's knowledge than basically any other combination of dispositions toward the thing.
Am I crazy for thinking that Chrome should be designed in a way where individual tab rendering processes should be able to upgrade without having to close and restart the entire cluster of processes? The actual browser UI shell very seldom needs updates...
LLMs are closer to discoveries on the spectrum than inventions. Nobody predicted or planned the many emergent capabilities we’ve seen. Almost like magic. Now is a period of moving along the axis to invention with many intentional design, architecture, and feature development alongside testing and evaluation. We are far from done with LLMs, plenty of room for many more discoveries, lots to explore. It’s definitely a precursor to AGI. They offer a platform to build and scale data sets and test beds.

We haven’t had ML models this large before. There’s innovation in architecture but we often come back to the bitter lesson: more data.

We’re likely going to see experimentation with language models to learn from few examples. Fine tuning pretrained LLMs shows they have quite a remarkable ability to learn from few examples.

Liquid AI has a new learning architecture for dynamic learning and much smaller models.

Some people seem mad about the bitter lesson, they want their model based on human features to work better when so far usually more data wins.

I think the next evolution here is in increasing the quality of the training data and giving it more structure. I suspect the right setup can seed emergent capabilities.
All three of these authors are amazing Computer Science Education researchers. Obviously, it's a well-cited and well-argued article as well, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that I expected nothing less from them. I actually learned a few things here - I had never heard of the Semantic Wave before. What a great share, thank you very much!
His latest video on open ended wires is very much worth a watch.
I'm not saying people aren't doing it! I'm just not sure it has the intended effect.

(Also to protect against physical failures it works, because physical failures are more independent than software ones, as far as I understand.)
My personal experience as a reader is that PH has turned into a garbage dump of anyone and everyone posting whatever project they have to make a quick buck. The quality of submissions is overall atrocious and predatory. It used to be worth looking at, though has for a while now been terrible. When GPT started booming, PH front-page and top projects were all copy-paste “AUTOMATE YOUR BLOG/SALES/X WITH AI” trash. It’s still half that and half paid marketing posts.
This. I don’t think LLMs are anywhere near sci-fi AGI (think I, robot)
It’s such a vague term anyway, AGI.

LLMs provide some really nice text generation, summarization, and outstanding semantic search.
It’s drop dead easy to make a natural language interface to anything now.

That’s a big deal. That’s what’s going to give this tech it’s longevity, imo.
It takes milliseconds. You can time it yourself in the inspector and throttle the CPU to like 1/3 speed.

I'd wager CSS is never the bottleneck. I've never once seen it be a performance issue, personally. Browsers are really really fast at rendering the DOM and styling it, especially if you only need to do it once at page load.

Even modern CSS isn't really that complex compared a hundred page Indesign file, for example. Computers and phones can handle it just fine.

If websites feel slow, IME it's usually ads/analytics, slow AJAX and backends, or scripting bottlenecks, loops, unnecessary redraws, efc. Not really basic DOM draws from CSS.
Do you mean the academic data ownership piece?
New York Times vs. Microsoft, OpenAI [pdf]
I've built something kind of similar to this for the UK which shows prices of post codes, so you can see what are the cheap / expensive areas in a town or city.

https://postcodeprices.com/cambridgeshire/cambridge
This been one of my biggest frustrations - I also use a USB 3.0 switch to toggle mouse & keyboard input between two PCs. I'll be on a teams call meeting where I don't have a lot to say and then someone mentions my name or messages me. I'm suddenly fiddling around looking to find the button to switch inputs back to the PC running teams. I thought about wiring up a ESP32 or Rpi Pico W with couple of optoisolators to the button pins on the USB switch. Then expose a http endpoint to simply toggle inputs between two machines via autohotkey script + keyboard shortcut. Only problem was that I couldn't come up with a way to determine which input is active. So gave up on the idea. But I like this solution.
John the Toolmaker
What is """"designers""""? I think MD3 looks pretty good compared to googles earlier attempts...
SqueezeSAM: User friendly mobile interactive segmentation
It is. At some point, when the co2 consumption is priced into everything, more users realize that all the grafted tools and libraries are just anxiety with bling bling and you should actually focus on the content instead of the exterior, they will rediscover plain old html. /s
2014: IT Recruitment Is Fucked
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...

Increases. And many more to come. Accident damage caused to riders of motorbikes is overwhelmingly more severe than car drivers. We can confidently presume similar ratio of e-scooters, especially as more often than not helmets and body protection is rarely worn. Nothing out of the ordinary saying or seeing this.
In a way I can understand them - there are often things people are used to breaking or changes in the UI with software updates (not so much with browsers usually I guess).
I can sympathise with older or less technical people who are afraid of an update forcing them to “relearn” how to do something they are used to.

Edit: not so much large corporations tbh.
I actually like to be able to walk home after dropping off the car for inspection at the shop. Those pollutants should be pretty contained, we're not in the 70es any more?
I thought that was Grubhub, Doordash does it as well?
Intro to LLM Security
"The legal landscape surrounding generative-AI is unsettled, with the technology still in its early days. There are other lawsuits that could test the rights of AI companies to “scrape” content from the web to train AI tools, including one by several prominent book authors against OpenAI. In February, Getty Images sued the AI art company Stability AI in Delaware, alleging that it had infringed on Getty’s copyrights."

Any news or speculations on these cases?
In analog computers, software is hard to separate from the hardware. In ones I had any experience with (as a part of a university course), the programming part was wiring things on patch panels, not unlike how you do it with modular analog synths. You could make the same machine run a really wide variety of analog calculations by connecting opamps and passive components in various ways.

If we could optimize a set of programs down to the FPGA bitstream or even Verilog level, that would approach the kind of programs analog computers run.

I can't tell anything about Turing completeness though. It's a fully discrete concept, and analog computers operate in the continuous signal domain.
2 additional years of general education is 2 extra years whether total training time is 4 years or 10 years. There’s no non-linear effect that I’m aware of that makes a 33% increase from 6 to 8 years somehow much more expensive or more painful than a 100% increase from 2 to 4.

All of the other profession degrees provide public services and so pass the costs of general education directly to the public. In many cases like with pharmacists and physical therapists, it’s directly affecting the medical system.

Also take a look at the percentage of medical costs that go to doctors. It’s a small percentage. Speeding their training up by 2 years isn’t going to make much of a dent.

In fact if you move to 6 year med school it might actuality make their education more expensive overall because med school is much more expensive per year than an undergraduate degree.
> SOME of them are.

Yes, it's true that not all of them are. But the first line treatment is pretty much always a stimulant, and non-stimulant pharmacotherapies for ADHD tend to not be as successful.

The main class of drugs considered to be non-stimulant treatments for ADHD, NSRIs, will actually have a somewhat stimulant effect owing to their primary usage being that of an antidepressant.

In rare cases you may even prescribe a depressor, but that's something you very rarely want to do-- every case is different and these drugs may work for some patients, but generally speaking it's a niche treatment approach with a very unfavourable risk-benefit ratio.
I created a custom GPT for Black friday deals.
Here you can check-
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-aMhMtTRCj-top-black-friday-cyber...
What is the role of biology and culture in understanding language(s)?
Data ownership as a redistributive element is very appealing I must say
> If a learner is not oriented towards written or read communication, their exam results may not reflect a written test

Being unable to communicate what you have learned is a serious disorder and not a learning style issue. Learning styles are about how you learn, not how you demonstrate what you learned.

But yes, people who are unable to write or read or very bad at writing have problems and tend to get extra support on written exams to make it fair for them, as the exam should test their knowledge and not their ability to write. For example they don't give blind people a zero just because they failed to read the exam.
Just because you don't like what I'm saying does not mean that it's not true. ADHD is very misunderstood.

This review is almost a decade old, but it should help correct some common misconceptions: https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/nrdp.2015.20
I don't think efficiency is synonymous with frontend development.
Words that come to mind - technical debt, framework lock in and dependency hell. Just to name a few.
Hire someone and produce proof he can run the business as a manager - then you can have at least 5-7xEBITDA
The trick is to make many LLMs work together in feedback loops. Some small some big.

That will get us to what was previously known as AGI. The definition of AGI will change, but we will have systems that put perform humans in most ways.
I have a KVM switch[1] and it's double middle mouse click to switch outputs. Works well with Mac, Linux or Windows.

[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GBXTW2Q?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_sh...
It says the same thing I just said. Did you read the report or just the summary? The summary looks like some civil service bias, as it doesn't actually state the most important facts to know clearly. But the report itself does make it clear.

Look at the actual PDF, in particular the graph on page 12 (JIM7/JIM8). This is inflation adjusted goods trade. As you can see Brexit has had no impact whatsoever. Inflation adjusted goods imports are about where they were in 2018. Inflation adjusted exports are about where they were in Jan 2020.

There was a very brief drop in both when the new controls came in. The disruption lasted only a period of months before trade resumed as before.

In other words, there's nothing to see here. This is the opposite of what was stated as 100% certainty by supposed economic experts. Anyone who said before the vote that leaving wouldn't have bad economic consequences was roundly shat upon as a expertise-denying dolt. Yet they were correct.

In terms of % of the total trade, it's the lowest ever in 2022.

The report states clearly: "The proportion of the UK’s total exports going to the EU has generally been declining gradually over the last 15-20 years". It's due to the rise of China/India as more important trading partners, so that would be expected even if the UK had stayed in.

Now look at the graph on page 15. It shows a smooth long term decline in the EU's importance as a trading partner. In particular there was no drop in relative exports to the EU after Brexit, again, despite clear promises that it'd have a huge effect.

What we can see from the report you cited is two things:

1. What I said is correct. Brexit has had no impact on trade. This shows up clearly when using inflation adjusted statistics - it's all a continuation of prior long term trends. Therefore by implication, EU membership was useless for the economy and the entire basis of the Remain campaign was therefore a lie (but did they realize that?!)

2. It's very easy to be misled by Remain bias in the establishment. The summary for "statistics on EU-UK trade" doesn't mention the lack of Brexit impact anywhere despite it being the most important result by far, with the result that you thought you were contradicting me without doing so.
And yet, we reached the moon, and I would say airplanes were a necessary step on the way, even if only for psychological reasons. For airplanes we had at least an example in nature, birds. But I am not aware of any animal that travelled from earth to the moon on its own, except us.
Just responding to the clunky and slow switching that is available. I have this wireless DELL mouse+keyboard set that switches quite easily and fast. Supports up to three devices (dongle + 2x BT). Dedicated key for tge switch, wirelss is instant, BT takes roughly 2 seconds.

I can't recommend it though, as the mouse scroll wheel broke pretty quickly, and it's apparently a common problem. Can't "warranty it" individually. I do like the keyboard so far.
Almost everything interesting about AI so far has been unexpected emergent behavior, and huge gains through minor insights. While I don't doubt that the current architecture is likely to have a current ceiling below that of peak human intelligence in certain dimensions, it's already surpassed it in some, and there are still gains to be made in others through things like synthetic data.

I also don't understand the claims that it doesn't generalize. I currently use it to solve problems that I can absolutely guarantee were not in its training set, and it generalizes well enough. I also think that one of the easiest ways to get it to generalize better would simply be through giving it synthetic data which demonstrates the process of generalizing.

It also seems foolish to extrapolate on what we have under the assumption that there won't be key insights/changes in architecture as we get to the limitations of synthetic data wins/multi-modal wins.
> It’s definitely a precursor to AGI.

What are you basing this claim on? There is no intelligence in an LLM, only humans fooled by randomness.
Even at twice per day switching using monitor controls would drive me nuts. The buttons, the menu, the delays, blanking and disconnects. By then I already forgot why I was even switching
This looks awesome!

Couple of questions:

1. Does it support any type inference?

2. It looks like objects have to explicitly declare what protocols (interfaces?) they implement when the object itself is declared. Is that true? If so, why did you opt for that rather than the typeclass approach where the struct is declared separately from its interface implementations?
This urban/rural divide happens all the time. Someone else in this thread mentioned gun laws as one example. My personal example is in Pennsylvania, the state legislature passed a bill[1] appointing an unelected special prosecutor to handle public transit crime. It affects most of the city of Philadelphia (and nowhere else in PA) and overrides the democratically elected DA that state Republicans don't like (and who they unsuccessfully tried to impeach). The yes vote? Mostly rural lawmakers imposing their will on urban voters who have no ability to have a say in who this special prosecutor will be.

[1] https://www.legis.state.pa.us/CFDOCS/Legis/PN/Public/btCheck...
I just released a minimal browser-based PDF editor intended for your exact usecase - https://github.com/photown/private-pdf

Let me know what you think!
> if they're not declarative and don't understand dependencies then how can they be better?

They are both a wash: you're spinning your gears trying to get a simple task done. My claim is that you might as well do it in python instead of wade through the cesspool of hidden rules or try to debug why your makefile silently fails. It's the same amount of time spent, you might as well check the date stamp in python and rebuild the source if it's newer than the output. They both suck, might as well suck in a modern language than trial by fire with make.
> What about things that aren't even available anymore any way but 'pirating'?

This isn’t as tricky as you think it is!

You don’t watch, read, listen to, play, etc. those things.
Ever since the Microsoft buyout, GitHub has had a ton more features as well as a ton more bugs. I'm extremely worried about their absolutely dominant status in the code-sharing space. I guess someone better could come along (just like GitHub overtook Sourceforge), but momentum is hard to overcome.

GitHub is a great tool, but I question the wisdom of "Let's centralize our decentralized version control".
I don't know the internals of chrome (I'm sure someone else here does), but that sounds like they'd be containerizing a bunch of runtime inside tabs. Would probably blow up memory usage. But not sure what their current tab sandboxing already entails.
I agree both ways work! I'm curious what about the many small bets worked in your case. It would be great to have a framework for "when to focus" and "when to diversify".
If you don't want to run awkward searches through your main Google account, DuckDuckGo provides decent results.
Amusing. My brother and I would sometimes do this on car rides. I suppose the reason it's not a disorder there is that it's optional. In many ways, many of these things seem problems only because someone can't not do them.
We are currently using radiation therapy which focuses gamma rays on a piece of tissue with cancer cells to kill it.

If you can do the same but instead of gamma rays use infrared, even if it kills indiscriminately, that should still be a net positive, don't you think?

And the main benefit here is that you can get these molecules into specific cells which in theory should allow killing cells based on some chemical characteristic.
Skills issue
The best setup I've found is what I lucked into at work. It's a Benq monitor (32", 4k) that does the KVM itself. There's a couple of Displayport inputs, each if which has a couple of USBs with it, as well as a USB C which is both peripheral and display input (and decent power output). Then there's a little pick on the desk for switching.

The nice thing is that it continually presents a monitor to all the inputs even when they're not being displayed. Means you don't get the flickering as Windows sorts itself out and so a much faster and more seamless switch.
Wow, I had no idea! There might be a 664 in box in my parent's house somewhere -- although it also might have been discarded some time in the last 20 years (as I imagine happened to many of them).
And consequently, the "Year of Linux on the desktop" never materialized.

And instead of working to address the issue, most of the "community" refused to acknowledge there was one. Suggesting otherwise was the start a flame war.

The fact that simple acknowledgment is still a work in progress after 3 decades is a less than hopeful sign for the future.
Just like Chrome had a whole thing about process isolation to avoid crashing the entire system, it would be quite excellent if they could figure out how to effectively update at a tab-based level. New tab? Get the newest Chrome in the tab.

Obviously would be quite frustrating to debug a thing only to realize tab A is version 1 and tab B is version 2 of course. And it seems like it would require a massive amount of effort. Would be cool though!
None of the above.

If I want to watch an old film, a bad film, or an old bad film, I pay for it or I don’t watch it.

I’ve bought films on Amazon rather than get off my butt to put the DVD in the player. So you can guess that if I don’t have access to it at the moment that I’ll pay for it. I bought the DVD, I didn’t buy the right to download the movie (unless it was one of those DVDs with a download code included).

I have 0 interest in anime.
> Pointing out failures too often might make the learner switch to a fixed mindset.

Why? If they see they can learn to fix those errors doesn't it lead to growth mindset? Growth comes from learning that you can improve, and improvement comes from understanding that you aren't perfect and make errors and then learning to avoid those errors.

People who got coddled and think they don't make errors don't have a growth mindset, they just think they are perfect as they are and there is nothing to improve. That is as close to fixed mindset you can get.

You probably mean that pointing out errors is negative feedback and might make the kid feel bad. But it has little to do with growth or fixed mindset.