skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking as a very careful shopper, my experiences at AMZN are quite different from the blogger's.

- Pricing

Amazon has excellent prices, even after they started charging sales tax in my state, and even after factoring in the annual Prime fee. Often the affiliate vendors don't charge sales tax[1], and sometimes they are a couple of bucks cheaper than the Prime price. I keep trying to find better deals elsewhere -- Ebay sometimes beats them -- but other vendors really can't compete.

- Selection

Selection at Amazon is fabulous. You can find literally anything there. Between Amazon and Ebay, they've got you covered for probably any kind of product you could imagine.

- User Experience

Well I haven't found it that difficult to do things like sort by price. You have to fast forward past the irrelevant items but many other online retailers have the same problem with false positives and deceptive categorization. After a while, people just get used to it and learn how to deal with it.

- Books

Amazon began as a book seller, and it remains one of their core competencies. The Kindle Paperwhite reader is an excellent product (the Fire tablets less so). Amazon has created a first rate ecology for e-books, self-publishers, and of course traditional printed material.

- Deals

I'm a shopping junkie and I'm always looking for bargains. I do online polls and other tasks to acquire Amazon gift cards, so I may not be the typical shopper. But there are opportunities to knock $5 off here, $10 off there, and really get some deals. Fill out this poll after the AnDevCon and receive a $20 gift card. Really? I'm all in! I live for this stuff.

- Returns

If you want the luxury of free returns for non-defective merchandise, then shop locally. That's what retail pricing is for -- to pay for the overhead of 10-20% return rates. If you can do your research and shop online very carefully, you can avoid the need to return. If a product is defective, on the other hand, Amazon has first rate service. Usually just print the label, stick it on the box, and leave it on the porch. OK, yeah, you probably need to have a roll of packing tape handy, and tape the box closed -- a rather trivial effort in the grand scheme of things.

Amazon's not perfect, not by a long stretch. Once in a while, there are better deals elsewhere. But if you shop realistically, efficiently, and try to accumulate gift cards, you make out like a bandit.

[1] Retail sales tax is gradually being extended to online sales. I respect the law, but I feel that I do not "owe" my state any more money than they already get from me (which is a lot). Just because a business has a "presence" in my state should not require them to charge sales tax on an item I ordered over the internet that was shipped from Seattle or Texas or China.
Somehow I feel that "grandstanding politicians" have a bit more say in how matters play out for Snowden, than do keyboard warriors on HN. Discounting what politicians believe due to their blow-hardiness is ignoring what the middle of the road American opinion likely is.

Who are the serious opponents if they aren't the politicians that stand in the way of his return?
Unions in negotiation, in the airline business, don't crash planes into each other, and you should feel ashamed for suggesting that they would.

The actual common tactic is using a variant of work-to-rule. Normally, maintenance crews can "backfill" their bureaucracy a bit after the physical work on an aircraft is done, which means the plane is going back into service while they file the paperwork.

During a protest action, instead they refuse to release the plane for service until every last bit of relevant paperwork has been filled out, signed, stamped, filed in triplicate and multiple receipts issued for it, which can involve tracking down a lot of people all over the airport to fill out and sign things. Which is technically what the procedures require, but basically never happens outside of a time when the maintenance union wants to gain leverage over the airline.

If you've ever been on a flight which had minor maintenance done at the gate, and then sat for 45 minutes while they "waited on the logbook", that was likely a work-to-rule action by the union.
> They introduce competition to taxi services and hotels, but they increase cooperation between consumers and Uber drivers, and AirBnB hosts and guests.

Yes, the point being that they give value to one group (their clients) while dumping externalities on everyone else. This is not something that society is supposed to tolerate; the company doing that should either stop dumping externalities or at least pay everyone else to compensate (taxes are one way of achieving that).

I'm not denying AirBnB/Uber are providing a valuable service to their customers. They do. They provide excellent and inexpensive service. At a cost for everyone else. Hence as I wrote in my original comment, it's burning trust to produce dollars.

> That's just pure speculation. Until we see the language we have no idea what cases it destroys or doesn't, or how vaguely worded it is. If there's a use that's beneficial to both parties, it should be possible to find a party who's willing to agree to it in order to receive that benefit, if the market is allowed to operate.

I didn't want to elaborate on that in order to keep the comment relatively short. But it's not "just a speculation", it's the obvious consequence of allowing the market to cooperate. If everyone bans AirBnB specifically in the contract, the existence of competition on the market implies that renters will soon have a problem with WaterMattressAndSupper. In order not to turn a contract into ever increasing blacklist, the point will have to be phrased vaguely.

> If there is in fact a problem, it should be easy enough to point out the facts of the damage that's being done without resorting to calling people names like douchebag and asshole. Such insults usually come out when there isn't any logical argument to be made.

There are arguments to be made, and there are being made. A lot of practical and economical ones. I was just trying to point out that insults like "asshole" don't mean "I have no arguments so I'll curse you instead". They're shorthands for "you're breaking an implicit social contract".
Thanks! Was just guessing, glad I wasn't too far off the mark.
Russia Unveils Massive Obama Secret About ISIS…We Bombed Nothing?
Uber on Slack
You need a link to prove that the UK has property rights?

To avoid dancing around the point: What you're calling a right, I'm calling a (legally) inalienable right. But let's abstract away from the terminology:

There are cases where the law says, "people can't legally do X to you". I call those "rights". In some cases, "A", that's followed by "... unless you consent." In some cases, "B", that's followed by "... irrespective of any expression of consent you give [1]".

If a right is infringed on, it matters greatly whether it's type A or B (and whether consent was given). Simply telling me they had the right, does not resolve it. But even if it's in B, you need to justify why type B rights ("inalienable") should exist at all, which I'm not convinced of. All the purported benefits of B rights would better be solved by transparency or waiting periods, not simply demonizing people who make the transaction as if "everyone understands why that's bad ... right?" [2]

Remember, a justification for why B should exist needs to explain why it's bad even though this is what both parties ostensibly want. (It's kinda scary that everyone I pose the question to, can't give an answer in their own words, or misunderstands the question.)

[1] "and if you get some material benefit in return for expressing such consent, the person who gave you that is a moron who deserves to be taken advantage of".

[2] If you want to know what my confusion feels like, imagine that your friend were all writing a sob story about how sympathetic character Bob had all his apples taken from him, "which he earned for himself". You then find out that Bob actually sold the apples and get a stern lecture that "no, his apples are an inalienable right: he can't sell them".
Applying the Free Software Criteria
VRGO-the missing piece to your VR puzzle
Maybe your next side project should be an assembly robot to assemble and operate the railgun for you, maybe inside of a concrete vault with Lexan around it. Then the railgun could be the project after that.
I fail to see how ending rent control would hurt property values. If anything, it should increase them; now there is not a multigenerational pseudo property right that can be passed on. You can see this in listings; rent controlled units sell for way below normal prices because of the threat that the tenant can invite a relative to stay and then pass on their sweet deal for another generation, all on the property owners' dime.

Rent stabilization is similar. It would raise the property values in rent stabilized buildings. It would also raise rents in the rent stabilized buildings.

Where it would hurt is market rate apartments. They would likely see rents fall over time given the market is no longer bifurcated.

To ease the transition, a phase out would probably be in order, but given that a phase out can be terminated it would probably have to be one big shove out the door.
This came out of a hackathon[1] and offers a bunch of useful commands:

/uber ride [origin] to [destination] -- Request a ride from [origin] to [destination].

/uber estimate [origin] to [destination] -- Get price and time estimates to drive from [origin] to [destination].

/uber status -- See the status of the last ride you requested on Slack.

/uber share -- Get a link to share your ride's progress.

/uber cancel -- Cancel the last ride you requested on Slack.

/uber help -- Get a list of available commands.

[1] https://devblog.uber.com/uber-slack-a-weekend-a-story-of-ope...
An outsourcing firm was fined by the DOJ in 2013 for alleged visa fraud: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visa...

Note also how some of these companies spend millions of dollars in lobbying each year: https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000078...
Depends on the person. Basically, to be good at both is a lot harder than writing a web app.

A lot of bioinformatics is implementing elaborate algorithms in a memory efficient way.

Things like

- approximate string search using modified suffix trees

- some new variation of the EM algo using a new optimization strategy

- the whole protein folding field where many implement the simulations on a huge array of GPUs. Here you not only have to know how to write efficient code on GPUs, but also be an expert in parallel algorithms if the algorithm you are implementing is not embarrassingly parallel.

However, these algos will be thrown out in a month so they don't care about maintainability or uptime.
Automatic typography isn't! Let's suppose for example, there is $P_A$ in the text. According to the rules of math typesetting if A stays for description like "Alice", it should be set in the current math roman font i.e. $P_\text{A}$. So $P_A$ looks suspicious, what shall the typesetter do? 1. ignore everything and this way leave the typographic responsibility to the author; 2. set it correctly, because she is one of those underpaid TeX-typesetter, who can read out of the text, what A stands for; 3. send back a question to the author for clarifying. And this is just a simple example. The before/after gap betweeen author typoscripts an proper typesetted books is enormous.

Sadly, the job of the scientific typesetter is not valued this days any more.
> People running Nexuses have root on their smartphone, even better, they can replace the copy of android with a modified one

I don't understand: Nexus products don't ship with root access for users, and while users can obtain root access through various methods, they can do the same on almost any mobile device. They can also replace Android with various alternatives on almost any mobile device. How are Nexus products special in these regards?
Don't forget about Reaktor! A great modular soft-synth for $200
I'm really bummed out that GTA-V's biz model isn't aligned with the goals of the modding community because the engine and content are just so damn good. The game world is the perfect platform for some excellent modded content that would have the potential to sell copies of the game years and years after release.
Maybe it's just my particular use case, but I tried that Microsoft one and the output was identical to Tesseract and ABBYY Cloud OCR.
Another option -- check out the very low profile USB thumbdrives (the one I've got sticks out about 4mm or so). Or see if you can get motherboards with an internal USB or SD socket. Maybe combine this with PXE boot for initial setup (the pod gets built with a blank internal thumbdrive, and on first boot it installs the Linux kernel and initial ramdisk image on the thumbdrive).
Edit: It looks like the motherboard you use does have a USB header on the motherboard, where you can plug in a boot thumbdrive.
+1 on the Caustic recommendation. The mobile version is perfect when you want to explore ideas without being chained to your workstation.
It's an arse-based controller!
KarthVader: Wrapper for Core Data
> "The technology pieces we have are incredible," says one member of Google's robots team. "We just have to commit to a particular direction to go in and focus."

A more positive framing of this would be that they're doing development bottom-up: develop good pieces first, then figure out what to assemble them into later. Given that Google hasn't been in robotics very long, and that their goal is to launch a consumer robot "before 2020", this strategy seems reasonable.
You might not want to carry that argument any further, since Verisign, which I presume you mean, is the single biggest CA today. They can sign anything.

They can not, however, subvert the root zone any more. Not since it was singed in 2010.
H-1B visas are paid by the employers not the employees.
> The claim that unlimited immigration would ruin American culture is laughable, because there is no such thing as "American culture". America has always been a melting pot of different cultures, much more so than any other country in the history of the world. That is what makes it unique.

This same claim gets made about Canada, and I always found it particularly offensive to anyone who isn't an immigrant with a foreign culture. It's a riduclous statement anyway. The south doesn't have their own culture? East vs west coast? Europeans were pointing out yesterday that Americans have different expectations for housing (bigger housing, suburbs), is that not a part of the culture?

Isn't the idea that we are welcoming to foreign cultures, and actively embrace multiculturalism a part of the culture?
I'm pretty sure Andy wouldn't consider robotics "somebody else's vision."
Blocky Roads Cracked Apk v1.2.5 Plus MOD Data Free Download
Twitter quietly kills Moments
i'm asian american and speak like a native, because i am one - i grew up in a mostly white affluent suburban setting. if anything i have a slight surfer twinge (spent most of my life in socal, and some in the bay, which also has a surfer twinge to their accent).

at home or in places like new york, nobody has any trouble understanding me.

when i go to places with less asian people, all of a sudden people ask me to repeat myself. but only at first - never halfway through a conversation.

it's almost as if they expect me to have a heavy accent, and when i don't, they need to reset their hearing brain.
I've often though there should be a similar mechanism for solving disagreements in the workplace.
We have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts.

Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc., it's really convenient to point to public posts to explain what we're talking about rather than having to put NDA's in place.

Overall it results in a lot of awareness and goodwill. It's incredibly gratifying after the team spends many late nights putting these together.

Gleb from Backblaze
Who Is Spying on US Cellphones? Lawmakers Demand an Answer
Until this generation, getting a channel onto the Apple TV was essentially restricted to huge media companies, and was limited to a kludgy little markup language, so I think we'll see pretty quickly that comparing last gen Apple TV to Roku isn't going to be indicative of the platforms' futures.
Replication is not supposed to be a "challenge", that is not the point. The first point is ensure you can communicate the methods effectively, this demonstrates the experimental conditions are understood. The other point is to see if the observation is stable to whatever differences arise due to varying time/location. And they should be looking at estimates of effect size, not whether p<0.05.

Attempting to replace the role of independent replication with opinion is an awful idea. And that is the goal here, to replace, not to supplement. Of course, it doesn't seem replication attempts are very common in this area to begin with. So this is actually going to be a justification for continuing that pseudoscientific practice and to avoid checking all the previous results.
I agree. In our Programming Languages class the professor used Racket when introducing functional programming. It worked very well.
Laziness? To learn a second language takes a long, long time. I remember reading "4400 hours" somewhere.

If you don't have an accent, congratulations, but it's not solely because of how hard-working you are, it's also because you learned the language while you were young.

I have yet to meet a single person who speaks a second language without an accent who began their study as an adult.
Innovation seems to work best under threat of poverty. Because it tends to push founders to build things with a least some near-term practicality that is of economic value to some party.

If you have $100m in the bank then the only primal motivation for a goal "of creating consumer robot technology by 2020" is articles like this one by BusinessInsider questioning what value has been created.

The arbitrary deadline set at the beginning (2020) could be another motivation, but that could probably be pushed back and the project refinanced because hey innovation is hard.
Because the total equity+salary package might have a future value that is much greater than say $200k.

Plus, the question really is 'why not?'. Access to H-1Bs could foster early growth in startups and, in the long-term, increase employment.
Not for every project but it does have it's uses (re: -ffreestanding -nostdlib, etc)
thank you for being one of the few people who actually knows what's going on underneath. Wit.ai's software computes meaning via statistical modeling of semantic roles as they relate to "intent". It loosely resembles the linguistic theory of Frame Semantics (Fillmore), embodied today in the FrameNet project at ICSI in Berkeley.
Thanks, I thought many HNers may have this problem and I am developer so I thought they can help and provide some good tips.
What is Volley. I searched google not got any helpful result.
I'm not sure what your comment added to the discussion. Between this thread and your overall comment history, you strike me as a very argumentative person.

When it is a nationwide difference it is not just "some" schools; it is systemic. That doesn't make charter schools the bad guys. That doesn't make public schools the good guys. It does, however, mean that this is a complex issue and charter schools are competing on unequal footing in at least one respect.
I recently implemented a RESTful resource mapper in go, which just accepts some basic parameters and an exemplar of a storable structure and wires up all the HTTP endpoints necessary to give users CRUD access to the resource.

I'm honestly very happy with how straightforward it was, even lacking generics---I solved the problem of no generics by basing the resource creation and management on JSON and a "Storable" interface that just defines key() and newEmpty() methods (so I have to write five lines of boilerplate for every struct that will be a resource... shrug). I didn't parameterize the storage logic, basing it on only a single NoSQL backend (BoltDB); however, parameterizing that side shouldn't be harder than wrapping the database access behind another interface.

I like the ability to switch between tight static typechecking and freer runtime typechecking on-the-fly, without having to build a large, complicated framework for either within the language. It may not be the most innovative language of the decade, but I think it's a pretty good combination of features for practical, high-performance web server development.
Might just give a VM a test. I still can't find a better balanced distro for Linux in terms of stability and packages. Zypper package manager is best in class and the build.opensuse.org is lightyears ahead of ppa.
This is under the assumption that fostering that type of creativity internally is a valuable model in the first place.

It's possible they would be better off financing a VC/acquisition arm than hiring another 5k employees to be creative 'intrapeneuers'. Or some other model not yet popularized (such as the Valve decentralized approach or some shared ownership scheme).
How to insert dynamic content in marketing and product emails
I went through it 8 years ago (via a K-1 and then as part of the permanent resident process) and didn't find it that onerous. There was a lot of repetition and some hassle with having to travel to another city for an interview and waiting for an employment authorisation document, but at no point did we consider involving a lawyer. I suspect the type of visa and country of origin make a huge difference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10541203

Fine! I concede the point! There are serious Snowden opponents who believe he's a Soviet spy --- really, there are. I'm glad if this court result, long overdue, establishes that he did some good.
I have been thinking about DNSSEC2 with online signing only for example, but it would not replace DNSCurve or DNS over TLS.
Yeah - I'm already following the development of Apparatus, the visually programmable slide editor. I didn't know they were related through Alan Kay, but it doesn't surprise me to learn it. :-)

[1] https://github.com/cdglabs/apparatus
`#go-nuts` is a very angry place.
Until there is a solution for Mickey Mouse the millions of dollars will keep everything behind copyright. We solve that one we will have Public Domain again.
Where is the repo? A project here in Santa Fe may be a useful addition and I'd like to get in touch with the authors.
Did the author ask it about how we can avert the heat death of the universe?
"Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

It's not under any license, it's just 'free'. We've talked about putting the Storage Pods under a license, and may at some point since we get this question periodically and picking a license that people are familiar with may make it more clear that we really are giving away the design.
Thanks for the link. I was actually going to write something in my comment like, "hey, you guys should have a referral program." Then I realized I ought to check to see if you already did first.
Startup Failure – The First Hand Experience and What You Can Learn from It
That's how I read the article: you either maintain it, or don't promise you will and stop billing.

Looks reasonable to me.
?

From what I see, the Moments tab is still Live.