skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon pricing anecdote – price decreases until purchase
Thought I'd share an interesting pricing anecdote from Amazon, as I'm not sure it's been observed before.

I just purchased a pair of Sandals on Amazon for $26.57, and noticed the price for those sandals is now (4 days later) $65.50.

It seems that starting September 13th when the item was priced at ~$59, Amazon lowered the price by ~$1 every day until October 1st when the price reached ~$26 (1). I purchased the item at $26.57, and according to camelcamelcamel the price increased that day to $65.50.

Why would Amazon do this?

Note: I bought what I assume is an unpopular size (mens size 8) of a relatively unpopular sandal (rank 1,092 in shoes), so I'm making the assumption that the timing of my purchase coinciding with the exact day of the price increase was no coincidence. They also still sell the same shoe in the same size, so getting rid of excess inventory doesn't seem like too plausible a reason for me...

1)http://i.imgur.com/MQOrVUv.jpg or http://camelcamelcamel.com/Teva-Mens-Jetter-Sandal-Cigar/product/B00849DKLK?context=browse
Or it could become an e-mail version of the google play store.
This is completely ignoring the fact that ads are how the content you enjoy gets paid for, and part of the social contract is that, since people won't pay, that the content will be paid for by ad views.
As discussed in the other comments, the default window is -10..10 and -10..10 in 3:2 aspect ratio.
As someone who worked in the Internet gambling industry and has to sit and see these Daily Fantasy Sports idiots run their loophole into the ground, I can only laugh. You can't flout your "legality" in front of a bunch of US Senators, advertise fraudulent returns, and have zero regulations and expect to get away with it.
It's not about the friend request per se, it's about being able to find people.

A large part of your FB profile is public. At the very least, I now know your last name. Maybe even your birthday.

In a lot of cases, that's enough to perform some light identity theft. Or I can find your exact address. Or I can find out where you work, or just see all the places you like hanging out at and so on and so on.

I don't want to be that easily findable by strangers, which is why I consistently use a "fake" identity online and offline. It's still me, everyone knows me as Swizec Teller, the name just doesn't have anything to do with my legal first and last name. And my legal name is purposefully difficult to tie with this identity unless you have certain background knowledge.
I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world."

Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.
> You have probably never written a significant piece of correct software.

So true.

When we were hiring for a senior engineer position a few months ago, one applicant said he wrote "bug free code."

I laughed, sent it around on slack. We all chuckled at it. The applicant did not get a call.
New Wearable Set to Disrupt how we interact with computers
Could it be that she has searched for and found your FB profile before you searched for her?
Yeah, in my mind, this completely negates the argument. If I don't engage in a given statistically risky behavior today, I'm paying more for insurance because some people do and the insurance company doesn't know who should be paying for that risky behavior so we all pay a little more.

To me, the more compelling angle to attack surveillance has to appeal to people's desire to keep some portion of their lives from being made public (rather than appealing to their wallet).
Apple Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup Perceptio
360˚ Camera on ISS to Give VR Astronaut Experience
Well specifically it would be cool if it counted the optimal number to set GOMAXPROCS to, since I think that's like the main use of runtime.NumCPU().
> A finer-grained system would be nice, no doubt, but OS users are pretty time-tested.

Mmmhmm. From what I understand, Android runs each Android application on the system as its own user and handles application permissions by making each permission its own group. Linux's user isolation is pretty good.

Other than lack of manpower and lack of interest, there's no reason why a Linux distro couldn't put in the medium-to-large amount of work it would take to make wrappers to do similar things for their most popular Linux applications. :)
Odd that the top level maintainers he yells at most understand why, don't mind it, and sometimes yell back. It seems to mostly be outsiders and one-off contributors that care. Which is to be expected of such an environment.

There's also this, which is essentially how company politics end up playing out. A bunch of two-faced back-stabbing bullshit and passive-aggressive behaviors.

>>Aside of that I completely agree with Linus,
>>that this policital correctness crusades are
>>merily creating more subtle and hard to fight
>>forms of real abuse.

>>I observe that every other day in big corporates,
>>which have written down code of conducts and
>>a gazillion of rules for interaction; they just
>>foster dishonesty and other fallacies.

>>I really prefer the honest slap from Linus
>>than dealing with people who signed and "comply"
>>to some code of conduct and stab you in your
>>back wherever they can.

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/17/730
Thanks for sharing this article. Looks like mgafrica.com is a source that most of us don't refer to.

The following details are pretty impressive - "Drones could account for 10% -15% of Africa’s transport sector in the next decade. The initial plan for Rwanda is to build three buildings that will enable the network to send supplies to nearly half of the country by 2020, the droneport proposal shows. Subsequent phases of the project could involve more than 40 droneports, rolled out like a network of petrol stations"
Again, from the judge in very article that's linked above, straight from his guilty conviction and subsequent sentencing:

I find that there is ample and unambiguous evidence that
Ulbricht commissioned five murders as part of his
efforts to protect his criminal enterprise and that he paid
for these murders. There is no evidence that he was
role-playing.

He wasn't charged and convicted of 5 attempted murders, his guilty sentence for running a continuing criminal enterprise was modified based on the preponderance of evidence that he attempted to have 5 people killed. It's 5, not 6 due to the corrupt FBI / SS agents.
someone please explain like i'm five - according to the wikipedia page, fantasy football scoring is based on the actual performance of the athletes you pick in an actual game. therefore, if the games themselves are not fixed, there should be no possibility of "insider information" - what information could the companies running the pool have that the general public do not? the article didn't make it any clearer.
I'm a little concerned by "app standby". What is it going to do to apps like wheresmydroid, which the user wants to always be running in the background, but only interacts with them very occasionally?
It's just insane how good this is. Yeah, the middle class is hurting (worldwide, or pretty close), but the bottom is escaping poverty at an amazing rate.
"The Web is an Error Condition" -- not an essay of its own but a comment within this one:

http://deirdre.net/programming-sucks-why-i-quit/

Honestly, I miss the days when Netscape Navigator would just halt rendering in the middle of your page, saying, “No, I will not parse any more of your shit until you fix it.”
> What about the people who do live single life, who do want their real-life relationships to follow them on-line?

Then they just drumroll use their real name?

Heck, they could have even used a more easily recognizable nickname... before this policy, anyway.
From the article:

The data that DraftKings acknowledged was released by its employee, Ethan Haskell, showed what particular players were most used in all lineups submitted to the site’s Millionaire Maker contests. Usually, that data is not released until the lineups for all games are finalized. Getting it early, however, is of great advantage to make tactical decisions, especially when your opponents do not have the information at all.
The only reason that I already know this is Hans Rosling. His work is excellent, check it out if you haven't already. http://www.gapminder.org/
https://www.google.com/webhp?q=hans+rosling&tbm=vid
As an ex-hackintosh user, and current Mac user -- instead of dealing with Hackintosh main problems (kernel panic and finding suitable drivers,...), I recommend you buy a Mac Mini.
Or you can build your own desktop with customized hardware that suitable with your hackintosh version. But be carefully, it still headache and you will give up your right to update your Mac OS in the future... (because the risk of the drivers)
That was just phrasing. The principle isn't that we enshrine a division between rich and poor. The principle is that separate communities enforce their own norms among themselves. It happens that separate communities may differ systematically in many ways, including wealth. But taking premodern England as an example, all of the aristocracy would belong to the same group, while different impoverished villages across the country would not share a unified system; they'd all have their own systems, because unlike the aristocracy, they don't have much to do with one another.

The laws applying to you are those of the community you belong to, irrespective of your net worth. If you want to change them, you need to be accepted by a different community (and then go live among them). The traditional way of doing that is to marry in.
Take for example Germany: Photocopying your ID is a crime, and changing your name is impossible (unless you get a court verdict that there is an actual need for you to change your name).

So Facebook’s Real Name policy forces me to get a court verdict and commit a crime? Great...
It's really weird to me how commonplace the attitude of "It is what it is" and "Government can't do anything".

The air and water quality in the US is vastly better since the passage of laws that created and empowered the EPA (Created by the Republican President Nixon). The endangered species act has had many similar successes.

I live on Maui. The waters are now filled with Green Sea Turtles and Humpback whales that were nearly non-existent just 30 years ago. Yet when development and global climate change are threatening our reefs, people look at you like you're crazy for thinking that laws can be effective in safeguarding the environment for the future.
By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song).

But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.
Thailand’s ‘single gateway’ internet censorship plan backfires
I use CircleCI for iOS CI/CD and one of the biggest reasons is it doesn't try to be an all-encompassing solution for what I need: it executes tests and reports results.

I wanted it to do more, so I wrote some simple tooling to do more. I wrote up in a blog post for ease of reproduction: http://zacwe.st/blog/automating-ios-builds/

I think for most users, just running the tests is a step in the right direction. Handling distribution (the CD part) is something you grow into if you haven't seen it before. If I have to think about how to configure every aspect, I'm probably not going to get very far into the setup.
"It is no longer a catastrophe if an unprivileged process binds to transport layer ports less than 1024. Everyone should consider reading and writing the network medium as unlimited due to hardware no longer costing a million dollars, regardless of what an operating system does."

This isn't why unprivileged users are unable to bind to ports lower than 1024. Software binding to those ports is assumed to be trusted system software. Preventing unprivved users from binding to those ports prevents a malicious unprivved user from finding a way to crash one of these trusted daemons and standing up his own, malicious copy in its place.
It depends on the product. CI is very compute intensive (and may be bandwidth intensive, depending on setup).
This is not a spare-time project. It is being developed at Google by the Chromium team, but it is not an official product, just an experiment. (The disclaimer there is standard boilerplate for open source code.)
Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?
IBM Acquires Cleversafe to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Storage Strateg
The chance of your central authentication system being down at the same time you have to troubleshoot an issue with a live system seems unlikely. And for those rare cases you can just enable the account in single user and troubleshoot after the reboot.
Why Johnny can't program (2002)
This journalistic impulse to sell the world as worse than it is will not end because a single journalist caught a quick (and likely fleeting) guilty conscience. It will continue until the profession recognizes that their addiction to narrative harms the entire population.
Why? Are they cheating their customers?
AMA with one of the pro bono defense attorneys for Richard Glossip
What are you referencing in regards to poverty? I would have guessed that the recent reduction in poverty is largely attributable to wealthy nations reducing efforts to centrally plan the economies of poor nations.
Is there any inflationary effect to the $1.25/day figure that has been used since the 1980s? It's not clear from the article whether it's adjusted for inflation.
What I've heard is that you should mostly pay attention to the gcc compilation part of SPEC if you want a good indication of real world performance.
In this case, one of their employees did exactly that.
Programming Sucks and Why I Quit
One of the previous versions of this talk I keep in a bookmarks folder named 'Must see videos'.
Even with that, you'd still have to be good enough to pick the best roster. I don't think it's as useful as the article makes it sound.
There newer version of this keyboard would then be wireless, but lacks a touchpad. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/0B47189/460/60AC6A0...
so it's basically using the "wisdom of the crowds" that play on the DraftKings site to put together a really good pick? that still seems like it shouldn't count as equivalent to insider information, because it's aggregating a bunch of guesses that have no information either.
"The data that DraftKings acknowledged was released by its employee, Ethan Haskell, showed what particular players were most used in all lineups submitted to the site’s Millionaire Maker contests. Usually, that data is not released until the lineups for all games are finalized. Getting it early, however, is of great advantage to make tactical decisions, especially when your opponents do not have the information at all.
A spokeswoman for DraftKings said Haskell simply made a mistake and that the company was certain that he did not use the information improperly. She declined to go into specifics about the safeguards or the company’s auditing policies."

I'm guessing that Haskell assumed that if 60% of people on DraftKings were going to pick [Fantasy Player X], then about 60% of people on FanDuel would pick [Fantasy Player X], and knowing so ahead of time informs the odds on each bet?

This reminds me of the Capital One/Chipotle incident (http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/capital-one...).
"What about the people who do live single life, who do want their real-life relationships to follow them on-line? Why should we bow down and twist our system for the unfortunate minority that has a stalker problem?"

How would allowing somebody to use a pseudonym prevent you (and any others who want their real-life relationships to follow them on-line) from continuing to use your real-world identities?
Could leverage HTTP Client Hints: https://github.com/igrigorik/http-client-hints
Huh? You just use the company's internal pricing model and use it on other sites once you know discrepancies. It's not "simple" but it's not genius level derivatives trading, either.
Came here to mention his lecture/BBC show Don't panic. Not only because it is interesting, but because a lecture that is produced like a TV show is a very interesting cross-over of genres.

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p...
The vast majority of mass shootings take place in places where guns are not allowed. This seems to indicate that guns are actually good at preventing mass shootings.

Finland and Norway have restrictive gun control, yet they're responsible for far more mass shooting fatalities per capita than the USA. How do you explain that?
This ignores the long term affects of building and maintaining such a culture. I guess it's great this doesn't affect you, but I'm sure it affects others.
No. If 60% of people pick Player X, his value goes down. This is parimutuel betting. You don't want significant overlap if you can help it; how would you beat the crowd otherwise?

You find outliers and apply a pricing model that finds the best gaps. The information is incredibly valuable. Take it from someone who did this for a living at one point.
I'm not terribly familiar with ship.io, but we use CircleCI at Tinfoil Security, and it's an excellent product.

If you're looking for a replacement to ship.io, it's definitely worth investigating. Their support is excellent, and I'm sure they'd be able to help you fill the ship.io shaped hole in your infrastructure.
Yeah. Nothing ground-breaking here.

Would still love to have a great open-source tool for this.
There are privacy settings for all of this... it's not forced in any way. Take the 5 mins to setup everything and it all works.
Beautifully said and matches closely my intuition and how it is depicted at the beginning of the film Her.
How is this impressive?
CodeCombat is hiring engineers and game designers
Well an easy answer is to take a lot of that money people are earning in technology (I'm talking personal income or gifts from companies) and put it towards programs that either work towards ending poverty in those cases (through economic development, direct cash grants, etc) or improving health conditions, which often helps.

Some possibilities (although there are many others): http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

If you have a novel approach using technology, you should pursue it, but don't let a lack of a technological solution prevent you from doing anything right now.
Science of the Martian: The Good, the Bad, and the Fascinating
I hear this a lot but I dont get it - Facebook has some of the most robust privacy settings of any platform.

You can control exactly how much information you want the public and different groups to see. Also, most people who complain about public data are the ones who willingly share most of it in the first place without a care.
> it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.

A tangent: I enounter this too, all the time, with intelligent, well-educated people. It's as if people don't understand what "example" means, or can't project concepts from an example to a broader class.

What am I misunderstanding?
I think when assembling a team on these websites that you get some fixed amount of cash to buy players to put on your team. The website uses the data on how many people play each football player to generate the cost of these players. I think this means then that employees can use this understanding of the value of players and the relative frequency that they are chosen to pick smarter.

I think in general, one would benefit from accurately picking players with great expected values who are also generally under-picked.
In the late 90s, I knew a guy who ran a free "pick the winner" football web site. He said he did it because of the phrase, "the masses are the asses", which means that the general public as a whole bets incorrectly and loses a majority of the time.

This may be a bit of a simplification of what he actually did, but it was my understanding that he would see the trends in how his users were betting for the week, then looked at at past performance and used that info to make bets himself. He started making quite a bit of money doing just that.

So generally, if you have data on how people are expecting games to go and have knowledge about the different betting and/or gaming sites, you have an advantage over the other players.
> Is this an issue though?

Yes. It's a huge fucking issue. I think I speak for plenty of people when I say that we don't want to be part of a culture that's known for bullying, harassment, sexism, etc... That crap is the whole reason I got into computers in the first place. It was a safe haven away from all the jocks and other very similar BS in highschool. Yet here we are tolerating and in some cases even celebrating similar actions within our own community.

This needs to change.
so he was trying to bet on which way the odds would be placed and get in ahead of that, with some sort of hedging that would work regardless of how the games turned out? i have a feeling there's some key insight i'm missing here - is this like placing a bet on a dark horse before the public catches on and the odds swing closer to even?
Nice job! Gonna give it a go when I have time to play with my blog.
Is there a kernel in here somewhere? I'm curious about the BCM hardware interface (and I'm hoping this isn't Linux, but ...)
While this article was more focused on poverty, the other major theme was that things and people are better now in many respects that people think it is.

For me, the environmental successes of the last 30 years are a pretty amazing example of some of the awesome things humans can do when they put their minds to it.

Additionally, the overly negative and pessimistic view of government and laws removes critical tools for that improvement.

That move away from centrally planning poor nations was often achieved by changes in laws, and by the actions of a wide variety of organizational bodies and peoples. I'm not sure I have enough information in this article or elsewhere to state what has been effective at reducing the poverty.
And to translate that to a potential game strategy, in large contests like these you generally want to zig when everyone else zags. Think of it like a lottery where you know what numbers everyone is playing beforehand. If 100 people bet 12345 and 0 bet 54321, you are better off choosing 54321. It won't necessarily get you a win, but it will help increase you expected value of return by knowing which popular numbers/players it is smart to avoid using.