skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Amazon Associates closed my account with $7k revenue without warning
I created a site back in March which is based on an upcoming product. Just over a week ago I applied for an Amazon Associates account. 7 days ago I was approved.

This morning I woke up to a rather vague but stern email from Amazon Associates saying they closed my account. The moral of the email says:

"You are not in compliance with the Associate Program Linking Requirements because your site makes inaccurate, over-broad, deceptive or otherwise misleading claims about Products, the Amazon Site, or our policies, promotions or prices."

My account has been closed, and they are hinting that I will not be paid for the revenue that I have currently earned.

It has been seven days since Amazon approved our site, so I find it hard to believe that they changed their mind even though we have made no changes to the content.

If they had warned us that some of the content had not been compliant, we would have fixed the issue ASAP.

Our site is very factual, and we don't have any "sales speak" trying to promote people to buy products. Our site focuses on one particular product, so there are no competitor products nor do we mention any other retailers or pricing.

I talked to Amazon on the phone; they didn't seem to have any more information beyond the email.

After talking to other people that monetize their sites with Amazon associates, they said it's almost impossible to get a detailed response from them, and they usually aren't interested in re-assessing your account.

If you guys have any ideas, can you please help me out!
Google ads are something we only see when searching on google. They're easy to tolerate.

No one will put up with virtual ads in AR.
I have. I'm saying that especially when public, there is no such thing as enough profitability. There's no number of ads that will satisfy shareholder demands. They'll have to squeeze more and more and the only possible signal that "more" has become "too much" is necessarily when users start walking away from the service.
I'm not sure this is true.

"Groupon keeps itself in cash by collecting money immediately when it sells its daily coupons to consumers while extending payments to the merchants over 60 days."

-http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702043580045770279...
For those out there who revile the Koch brothers:

The research was funded by the Koch Institute
The nature of Second Life makes optimization a challenge. The geometry is fully dynamic so you can't pre-compute line of sight or use a lot of other performance saving tricks. The people making things are not skilled with efficient 3D design, so even if there was a way to do things like remove hidden triangles from models most people would not use it. Textures get uploaded in ridiculous sizes for things that should be using low res sheeted textures.

And even if you manage to build yourself a nice efficient well designed island other people will show up with avatars wearing massively over-detailed jeweler with 4k textures on every surface and with a few buggy CPU-killing addons that fight each other to try and fix a few of Second Life's design problems, and suddenly your server is on it's knees begging for more CPU cycles while your grapics card is busy choking every time their avatar is near.

The short version is when people can build anything you'll get some amazing works but you'll also get a lot of poor quality, performance killing crap. I don't see VR changing that, but there is a place for a Second-Life life competitor that limits what people can do to hit a nice balance of performance vs. freedom.
I recommend 'debugger.html' [1] from Mozilla.

"debugger.html is a hackable debugger for modern times, built from the ground up using React and Redux. It is designed to be approachable, yet powerful. And it is engineered to be predictable, understandable, and testable.

Mozilla created this debugger for use in the Firefox Developer Tools."

[1] https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html
That's the logic used to lobby for allowing cruise ships to dock in your port, but the reality is it's the high-end visitors who spend money. The kind who stay in a nice hotel.
Fiber the way the US does it is rather lame. Consider that where Google has put in fiber the houses now have:

- Copper telco lines

- Coax cable lines

- Google fiber

There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line.

We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...
> cynic or perhaps nihilist

Nonsense. It is a perfectly reasonable perspective for someone who isn't terribly interested in technological development and wants to live practically with what exists today. There's a place for dreaming about Mars, but most people don't. That's fine, and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with cynicism or nihilism.
I did an analysis of the best deals in the early days of Groupon, and they were all classes that were better when attended with friends. (I think the best selling one in the early days was a cupcake baking class.)
This story is kind of unbelievable. Not sure what to take from it.
> You wouldn't have a cell phone, and especially a data connection, if not for the space program.

Is that so? Can you give me a source?
Mattermost[1]: Open-source Slack alternative written in React and Go.

[1] https://www.mattermost.org
How does this compare to something like zerotier? And how does this "All traffic transmit directly to recipient peer without passing any gateways." without hitting some server to negotiate the first connect? Does the "MESHBIRD_KEY" contain the IP?
But they can only do that because there is an existing housing shortage. You can say that AirBnB exacerbates and existing housing shortage, but it doesn't create one in the first place since the financial incentives aren't there to get creative in the ways you're describing. And reactions to crowded housing markets don't help either. For example, rent control can become such a nightmare for a landlord that making an equivalent amount of rent through AirBnB can be very attractive despite how much more work it is to rent out that way.

FWIW, my parents rent out an extra building on their property using AirBnB. They're retired and they view it as their job now, but I see it more like a hobby. The amount of work they have to put in to make around $30k/yr is substantial and they'd almost certainly do better renting to a full-time tenant and getting part-time jobs. But they're in a location that doesn't have a housing shortage. It's only because people can make a lot more money that they rent on AirBnB.
But the iPhone is predictably released each year, so I'm not sure this is really the same.
According to a 2011 Center for Disease Controls and Prevention study 1 in 5 women have been raped or experienced attempted rape [1]

Women are also harassed.

Why don't you ask some of your female friends whether they would want the security when in their apartment buildings?

[1]
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/...
Yeah. It's like the argument "because it's against the law, it's fundamentally bad."

Just take a look at dealership laws. Do you really think those laws are there to protect consumers? Or do they merely protect the incumbents which helped push for the laws?

And now we're forced to buy used cars from sleazy middlemen because they have a legislated monopoly. Good thing those laws are there to protect us!
No kidding. If everyone thought that way, the only JSON parser to exist and which everyone uses would be barely working, because everyone would be put off from trying to write something better.

I have actually written an HTML parser, and it was not so difficult because the HTML spec specifies everything down to the level of tokenising individual characters.
Is it that important? That age group isn't known for it's disposable income.
I've only had good experiences with AirBnB. Almost exclusively the issue here seems to be guest partying and abuse of the property. Is this really true? How is it the guest rating system doesn't quickly eliminate guests that cause problems?

Who is doing so much partying? Where did these people come from? Where do they normally party before AirBnb?
So, in general, tools like Docker are crap because they're like the Apple iPod equivalent of old standard Unix-style tools: bloated monolithic slapped together crap that's crammed with non-extensible non-intuitive extras, designed for people who don't want to know anything about how the sausage is made. But if you do want to do fancy production things, it's nice to have a tool that thousands of people have used for thousands of different things, and bake in all the weird fixes for weird problems over thousands of iterations of testing and bug-fixing.

However. If what you want is to simply understand what's going on under the hood, this is a great way to do it. The only thing better that I would recommend is to actually make your own Docker. It's not that difficult, you're basically just slapping together some system calls and execvp()ing some other standard tools, which is what Docker does, and you don't need to support any of the extra fancy features. But you gain an intimate understanding of what could be going on when stuff in production is breaking.
Think about it - 1 or 2 TB hybrid drive ? Do you think very small spinning drives come in that size? and would they pay for custom gear vs just going with an SSD (which can also be custom sized too don't forget)?

Microsoft has a lot of money, but I'm not sure that's where they should spend their money. An SSD in m.2 size is expensive, but less expensive than getting all custom gear.

This is about thinking things through ....

The logical thing is to have a 512G M.2 nvme paired up with a 2TB regular spinning drive (at 2.5") and calling it a day.

That's I would go with for a deluxe, small form factor, graphics pro oriented machine. That's the sweet spot. And it's really easy to build with off the shelf parts like the Intel NUC as a base.
Seems like everyone is forgetting the original original surface... a table computer.
Resizer is linkable, so it's easy to share with your colleagues in design and product. If you're a developer actively working on your own machine, DevTools is probably the better tool for you.
there are DBA services that do an excellent job for a fraction of that price. they also do AWS stuff too.

full-time DBA's work for either enormous corporations, or database consulting firms. it's very rare you will see some random small-medium company with even one DBA on payroll.
Unless you want to maintain a fork we could very easily make life difficult ;)

I don't have a concrete answer, but if it happens you just gotta work around it. Not much different than having a dozen competitors trying to do the same thing as you.

I think it's very easy to see you, as a commercial business, wouldn't want to put all of your livelihood on a project that has 150k lines of code and you know very little about. That's obviously not true for every project, but if your project is so simple there's no reason I couldn't just reimplement it anyways.
Twitter is massively unprofitable.
12 months ending 2015-12-31: loss of over USD500MM.
3 months ending 2016-06-30: loss of USD107MM.
It depends. If they do it knowingly, then usually yes.

But eBay profits from people selling stolen goods.

A telco profits when people conspire to commit crimes via email or phone.

A pharmaceutical company profits when an addict buys drugs under a fake prescription.

But the companies aren't specifically commit a crime just because those things happened and the company received income from it.

Companies are expected to do take reasonable steps to limit those sorts of activities, and to appropriately assist law enforcement when they seek to investigate or curb such occurrences.
I love how quickly things move in crystal right now. ️
I was a fan of this one. Lots of expert authors, lots of good information!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01I0QTHYK#nav-subnav
I don't care about anything else but how come today's high end computers start out with 8gb of ram? That was probably enough 2 years ago. Now it's enough for a net book. My phone has 4gb ram now. And they expect me to pay ~$2500 and get 8gb in a desktop?
Is this the architect of the "18F" failure (losing $16 million per year thus far)?
No - it means you can charge more to rent by the week than by the year, because tourists are willing to part with more money as part of the experience of visiting a place. It makes little sense to peg residential rent to what the tourist market will bear.
>GAAP strikes me as a set of things that, alone, are good intentions but combined are more confusing than they need to be.

That's probably reasonably accurate. GAAP is intended to prevent various accounting reporting practices that, historically, were sometimes used to obscure material aspects of a company's financial position. However, GAAP numbers may also present a company's numbers in ways that aren't the most meaningful or "fair"--at least in the eyes of the company. That's one reason that companies often present both GAAP and non-GAAP results.
Twitter loses over USD600MM / yr. The playbook is yet to be proven. If they were earning 2.6B / yr, news articles and market perception would be very, very different.
The name is spelled Groupon, as a combination of group + coupon.
Europe thought that WW1 would be a repeat of Sedan[1], not Petersburg[2].

The generals of the Civil War studied Clausewitz and Napoleon, and the troops went to war with smooth-bore bronze cannon and Napoleonic fire drill. They were largely tempered in the brief, not-too-bloody, and glorious Mexican-American War. It took them a few years and tens of thousands of casualties to learn what havoc accurate, long-range rifles, even if muzzle-loading, could do.

Militaries are eternally building themselves to fight the last war. When they do learn from their experience, quite often the lessons learned are the wrong ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sedan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Petersburg
Karen Sandler Delivered OSCON EU Keynote, Taught London Kids about Free Software
Are you sure about maintenance? Consumer Reports has all of the currently released cars at below average reliability.
So this lawsuit is really 90% Ev Williams selling some shares in 2015. If I am not mistaken he didn't work there anymore and had already started Medium.

Also all this was public information at the time. All these insiders would have filed a notice with the SEC when they sell shares.

Still, Twitter is run quite poorly and lawyers will make a lot of money on this weak ash lawsuit.

Ironically this lawsuit will likely just lower the stock price even further if it has any effect at all, which I doubt it will.
What might an ideal IPC API look like to you?

I can't answer that because I don't have a PhD related to IPC, and I haven't done the necessary research to fully understand the field. I have looked at how some other systems are doing it, but I know that is not a strong enough knowledge-base to build a good IPC system.

I do have enough understanding to know that when I look at a good IPC api, I will look at it and say, "wow, that's really nice."
Glassdoor could easily add that.
At a minimum 100k, which is enough to start proving the market out and getting some virtuous cycles building.
I agree with both of you. The glasses are silly, don't seem that technically complex, and I think they are poised to be a huge hit with Snapchat's base audience. Google Glass was a technically well made device that forgot product, I think those stupid glasses hit their product-market fit quite well. The recording indicator and their 'retro' style are both what I consider to be key components in this assessment.
2016 GraphQL Conference takeaways
Yes, I'd noticed that (my boss is a stickler for pixel-perfect vertical centering). Really happy that this will be addressed.
This was on HN just a few days ago - http://timharford.com/2016/10/theres-magic-in-mess-why-you-s...

The short version is use piles to sort and purge the piles regularly. The "good stuff" will rise to the top and you discard the junk.

Bookmarks are just another pile...
Introducing Hundred Dollar Drawings!
We wrote slack-like app for reddit called Breaker and the front-end is written in React:

- http://breakerapp.com/r/breakerapp

- http://github.com/larvalabs/breaker
Why do you hate this guy? In most areas of computer science, certain value of publications is attributed to the venue where they are published, which isn't necessarily science or lancet. His RV work got the best paper award, which is a good indicator of quality and potential. The other two papers are in reasonably good venues.

I think that his publications record isn't great, and that and his personality are perhaps what lead to his tenure's outcomes, but that's not a point you are making.
Unfortunately one often has to interact with APIs which require JSON, but I completely agree that pure binary formats are far simpler to work with.
Here's an excellent OCaml MOOC; https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/parisdiderot/56002S02/sessio...

There are lots of small programming exercises. I've got another week remaining. Not sure if you can still join. It's a bit of work so you probably want to wait until the next session.
I'm primarily trying to point out that google's repeated claims that their performance on TPC-H #22 means that BQ is categorically better than Amazon Redshift are misleading.

Also I think you meant transactional not transnational
Thanks for the followup. I enjoyed reading the article and it is a very interesting project and a great effort. I did read at the end that it was about how to amplify the efforts of the human curators -- a great problem to tackle.
According to your link only 10.5% were raped and 6.5% experienced an attempted rape.

And even that includes some murkiness over things like "too drunk to consent".

If you want real rape statistics then look at sexual assault charges, not surveys.
It's funny how in the past 20 years the VC funding rounds have gotten much larger while the work environments have gotten much worse.
Really? I have a 20 year old Honda del Sol--which is essentially a 2-seater Civic variant--on which I spend under $500/yr on gas and under $500/year on maintenance. That's not typical I'm sure--and I do have another vehicle--but you can't claim your numbers as general savings.
Automatically detecting Linux kernel interface changes
"Genetic inferiors" is your phrase, not mine, pal. I do not quite think of it in those terms and I am not advocating that we end the welfare state in its entirety. Quite the contrary actually, realistically assessing the evidence has lead me to be significantly more sympathetic to non-market remedies of various sorts. The main idea I am trying to communicate here is that if you actually want to help the poor, instead of just protecting your ideology from information not congenial to your world view, you are best advised to grapple with the evidence.
Linux Graphics world domination may be closer than it appears
But don't you think that because AR is just starting to have a place in our mobile phones it is open to a lot of newcomers? This is not a mature market sector like social networks, ads, or search.
Maybe Bose has bought out in-flight magazines about office design. This goes all the way to the top.
Sandboxing with the Landlock Linux security module
The end of the Linux 4.9 merge window
Rethinking Linux device memory allocation
1 in 5 women are raped or experience attempted rape according to CDC

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/...

Violent crime happens to random victims.
Linux drivers in user space – a survey
Browserified JavaScript in Debian
PostgreSQL 9.6 improves synchronous replication and more
Scientists develop technique of ‘uploading knowledge to your brain’ (March 2016)
https://github.com/madou/armory-react

A Guild Wars 2 Armory. Fairly impressive. You can view it live too https://gw2armory.com/
WSL doesn't actually run a Linux kernel; it emulates the syscalls and process environment Linux offers and provides a binary loader. It's WINE in reverse.

So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.
I work in an open office and honestly it doesn't bother me. When I'm working on a problem intently I tend to get into a headspace where I don't notice the distractions around me.

Sometimes if I'm deeply engrossed in a problem a coworker will have to repeat my name several times before I realize they are trying to get my attention.

Other people in my team complain about the environment a lot. The ones that do tend to listen to music on headphones to tune out.

I think a lot of it depends on your upbringing. I grew up as the oldest child in a house full of younger siblings my home environment was always very noisy so I suspect I have a higher tolerance for working/studying etc in a distraction rich environment.

The benefit I see to an open office is being able to contribute to colleagues discussions several times a week I'll overhear a conversation or a colleague will be listening to mine and be able to interject.

Several valuable conversations have started based around "I overheard you were working on... I had a similar problem I solved by doing... Then often a third colleague will jump in etc. If we were each in private offices this wouldn't have occurred.

Edit: Related anecdote when I was at University I spent some time working as an apprentice the company wasn't expecting me to show up or there was some communication issue etc didn't have a proper desk for me when I arrived so for several weeks they shoved me into the room with all the photocopiers and this huge B0 drafting printer the Mechanical Engineers used to print technical drawings. This thing was based on old dot matrix technology used to make a hell of a lot of noise when it fired up it would scare the crap out of me every time. That obviously was distracting...
https://www.google.com/keep/ is fantastic for reminders. It's integrated into Google Now (So "Ok Google, remind me to do x at y") and can do time or location based reminders. You can also share tasks.
When someone builds a multistory building, they will build the first floor to support the second floor. And in general it is exceedingly obvious why that is the case.

The problem with software is the abstraction. The first floor and the second floor aren't connected in any physical fashion. It's easy to rip out the first floor after the second is build, and only later realize you cannot support the necessary load.
I'm not so sure. Even with their rudimentary pre-AR camera filters, some were pretty popular and successful [1]. The Gatorade dunk filter generated 160 million impressions and the company was very pleased [2] -- and people seemed to like it.

The filters are also interesting because they involve user choice: the ads are not unsolicited; rather, they are picked by the users. That's pretty interesting.

We've had in-game advertising in video games for a while; certain games that mimic realistic urban environments lend themselves well to this. In some settings, AR could include a density of advertising -- passive or interactive -- similar to the real world without much trouble. In fact, an AR setting devoid of any commercial presence may be unsettling on its own.

[1] https://medium.com/comms-planning/11-branded-snapchat-filter...

[2] http://digiday.com/brands/inside-gatorades-digital-ad-playbo...