skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're fully remote and regularly hire people with remote work experience. However, it is important that our team members are self managing and we do ask questions about that during the interview.
pressured by big name authors who were use to the big royalty checks

Um. Goodness. Traditionally, publishers set a wholesale price and a "suggested" cover price. Retailers set the retail price, what the customer is actually going to pay -- but the royalties paid to authors are based on the publisher's suggested cover price. If the book lists for $24.95 and the author's contract stipulates 17% royalties on hardcovers, it doesn't matter if you, the consumer, pays $24.95, $18.75 or 25¢ -- the author is going to get $4.24.

Amazon, like Walmart, can afford to price physical books at or even below wholesale price, because they're making the money up in other ways. B&N and most other booksellers can't compete on price with Amazon because they can't do that. Amazon has long been weirdly close to the old joke of "we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume"; the vast majority of their profit comes from AWS.

Also, B&N was actually selling books online before the consumer internet, via Prodigy. They were selling on the web by 1997, and the Nook ebook reader was introduced in 2009, only two years after the Kindle. Whatever their historic and current faults have been, being entirely ignorant of the electronic world isn't really one of them.
Adding onto this, Factorio is a game that will greatly appeal to the HN crowd. It's a 2D topdown version of Minecraft that is focused on manufacturing via the construction of large factories. Instead of mining coal with an axe, you build a drill over a coal deposit, which funnels coal to a boiler, which pumps steam into a steam engine, which powers another drill, so on and so forth. The developers don't put the game on sale, so feel free to jump on it. I've got played >100 hours.
A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.

Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.

Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.
Retail seems to be killing retail though -- it's a death spiral. Going to a lot malls right now is depressing. And I need to buy things, mostly clothing, but the selection and quality has gone down significantly in the last decade.

I'm not sure this being made up in online sales.
> rule of law [is] essential to modern civilization.

I feel like that is a false assumption. How often do you actually appeal to law in your day to day life?
With all the waste heat, you'd think some kind of district heating would be attempted?
The folks who are worried about AI destroying jobs are aware of this cycle, but they think that it's different this time.

Specifically, that technology has previously allowed workers to be more productive by shifting away from manual labor and towards cognitive work that requires the human mind. But AI is a unique threat because it can match (and then quickly absolutely dominate) humans for any kind of work that requires cognitive power.

It's not a ridiculous argument, but I'm not convinced for several reasons:

1. I'm not convinced that AI can actually achieve something like the general intelligence that's required to perform in rapidly changing and dynamic environments.

2. Even if they can, there are lots of artistic and creative jobs that AI may not be able to do. Maybe we'll all be writers and poets and songwriters and sculptures in the future.

3. Also, doesn't incredibly smart and capable AI that can do any job that humans can do mean that the price of everything should plummet? Maybe post-scarcity will look different than we expect; maybe all the things we need for life will be effectively free, and companies will give them away the way they do with advertising schwag now.

4. If AI gets so cognitively powerful that it puts most of humans out of a job, we'll have either much bigger things to worry about (war with AI), or nothing to worry about (they'll either just squish us quickly or save us from all this).
Scarcity in UX: The psychological bias that became the norm
> it's knowing if it's safe and effective.

What do you do about all the flawed and weakly powered clinical trials of the past then? Do you consider them invalid at some point? If not, why have double standards then?
Anyone else think that the finance folks are just realizing what the tech sector gets away with by being incomprehensible and too fast for regulators? They're just doubling down and digging into tech to get away with more, for longer...
Model 3 driver's crash experience prompts Elon Musk to add new safety features
This has an assumption built in: The more money you control, the more your your opinions ought to shape what work someone else does. Some people think the assumption is very true, some think it is very false.
> Noise usually has a gaussian distribution

This belief is often a good indicator that a data scientist is divorced from reality.
Google does it partially. Its called rich snippet.
I know the solution: Just remove government officials who use the word "cyber".
If you want to learn about how to do robots in microgravity, you have to really do it. It’s not just controls but also how lubricants behave, how dust and crud behaves in motors, and all the little things.

I think the human form factor is not the most useful, but it’s going to be important eventually to be able to do manipulation in orbit.
What I would expect from a tool like this is data encryption using a client side generated private key. I understand this would complicate things like calculations/visualizations, but since you're dealing with pretty sensitive data I think it would be worthwhile.
The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
Cribbing from r/economics FAQ on automation

--------

> It's important to note that the vast majority of workers (>90%) before the industrial revolution worked in agriculture, and that this number is now less than 5%. Why did the automation of agriculture not lead to widespread, long term unemployment? This is because disruptive technologies have multiple effects. They:

* Destroy existing jobs

* Complement existing jobs (by making them more efficient)

* Create new jobs

* Reallocate the workforce to where it is most productive

Note that only one of those four effects causes long run job loss. Two of those cause job loss in general (job reallocation implies job loss in the short term, after all).

For automation to cause long run structural unemployment, the new technology needs not only to destroy jobs and create no new jobs, but it also needs to somehow prevent reallocation of workers to other sectors of the economy.

-------

The issue as I see it is not so much automation, which is inevitable. The issue is that humans are hard to retrain, unless you spend a lot of expensive human power to make the transition.

This makes it un-economical (you need to give people money, and time, and teachers, and then IF they certify, they need to qualify/compete with people who were already in the industry).

Re-training is an unsolved problem (In my opinion), and it is possible we may not want to solve it.

As the internet has shown, any communication technology is morally neutral. If you found a way to re-train huge groups of people faster than ever before, then that tool could be used to indoctrinate people faster than before as well.

EDIT: It is pretty important to note that this is the current weak spot in the over arching economic model that drives the world.

Tech advances are mathematically responsible for improving the size of the economy - they are necessary and critical for humanity.

The general answer by economics is that people move to other sectors where there is demand for them.

Unfortunately, if you cannot make that move, the system doesn't work that well.

Or worse - you make a move from being a manager to a burger flipper.

One side effect of this is an increase in inequality of wealth distribution.

So figuring out if re-training works, and if it is working at the scale needed to deal with creative disruption, is obviously a major component of future human well being.
>Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken

Just checked this in Firefox and it loads completely fine via IPv6 (and I verified using the devtools that it is using IPv6).
So it’s ok for google to scrape and save images and display them without compensating photographers (which I’m cool with), but not users? This is bizarre, anti user functionality.

By default if the image is available on the web, it is meant to be seen. This is going to make high school PowerPoint users spend more time, and result in zero extra revenue and zero drop in copyright infringement.

The more interesting question is why google is doing this.
Good riddance, if we're lucky he'll move to another country.
That would be an enormous problem for us. We need rustfmt to be configurable because it let's us use it to make MISRA-like style guidelines automatically enforceable for our codebase, which would be likely summarily rejected without them, so then we'd be forced to either do it manually or reinvent most of rustfmt ourselves.
Signing and authenticated chains of custody will be necessary. That'll work in legal and other expert contexts. But yes, it'll be hard for most individuals.
DuckDuckGo still has this feature in their Images search, using the "View File" button.

It also doesn't wrap the URL of search results in a Google redirect URL, so you can Right Click > Copy to get the actual URL of the webpage or image.
The view image button took you to the image hosted on the non-google webserver, it had nothing to do with an image cache (which is still there, its what google shows you in the results).
It costs $26,000 to mine one Bitcoin in South Korea – and just $530 in Venezuela
That's a wonderful story, but may be premature. I don't know the UK market, but I'm not sure I'd invest in 2018.
The "ship from store" argument does not make sense.

Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.

If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
Well, that’s the point of the article, isn’t it? The long-time employees that were laid off were almost certainly there out of love of their wares, and the parent business could have put the work into making value out of that distinguishing fact. But beyond that, they had institutional knowledge, both of how the business works and what their customers want. I know it’s hard to imagine that retail work could involve any amount of skill or knowledge, but this is no doubt a loss of value.
Uh, no, Windows doesn't have a similar feature.

That Windows option is specifically for:

- linebreaking support for east and southeast asian languages: Many of them don't use spaces, so if you want to know where you can break lines it is best to know what the words are. For this you need to have a pretty large dictionary file stored.

- fonts

- probably various assets for RTL languages (changed backgrounds, changed layout files, etc)

This is Windows providing this option for a very specific thing (and also downloading some files), for which there is okayish fallback functionality. Not cfg'ing the entire text stack.

I don't think you can easily slice and dice a text stack so that you can only pull in the components needed for Latin scripts without making it even more prone to bugs. You could write entirely separate stacks specialized for each group of scripts. But you'd probably end up with one for Latin/Cyrillic/Greek, one for Chinese/Japanese (not Korean) and one for "all the rest". There's enough feature overlap between most of the complex languages that there's questionable benefit to separating that out.

For example, most of the underlying text functionality in Telugu or other Indic scripts is not overall different from things in Hangul or Arabic (Arabic is more complex, actually), it's just that Telugu has certain features that press the buttons in just the right way to cause this crash. Which means that if you want to prevent this crash for other language users, what you need to do is not attempt to render Telugu, not swap out the font stack.

Like, looking at the last iOS crash that happened -- with the Arabic text -- that was because chopping off the end of a string of Arabic text doesn't guarantee that the string will be shorter. Really, you can replicate this for most scripts, it's just subtler (Even English has support for this, if your kerning is extreme enough. As long as your stack supports kerning, it supports everything necessary to crash this bug). So, the root text stack functionality that lets this happen is necessary for all scripts, Arabic just ends up pushing the right buttons in the right order to cause a crash.
The tragedy, for me, is that while I agree with most of what you've said and my transition to ebooks has been similar to yours, I've also begun realizing what we're losing by moving away from brick-and-mortar retail.

I look back on my childhood in the 80s and 90s and remember retail as not only fulfilling the need of acquiring stuff but also as a central meeting place. Going downtown to buy stuff was an activity as much as it was an errand. There were movie theaters, restaurants and all sorts of other business that existed in an symbiotic ecosystem with all the retail outlets. Over time, each of these business has been or is being replaced by a more-efficient, internet version of itself. We now order more and more food delivery rather than eating out. We now stream more of our entertainment in our homes and many people haven't been to a theater more than a couple of times per year. And while none of these shifts is bad in and of itself, the common theme is that we've replaced the social version of each of them with a version that we use alone, interacting only with a computer and not another human being.

I don't think it's a coincidence that we're having an epidemic of drug addiction and overdose considering how often drug addiction is a side effect of lack of human connection. We've taken all of these services and removed the human interaction and I think we're seeing that that human interaction was more than just fulfilling a transactional need. It was also keeping us sane in minuscule increments that, overall, added up to something tangible.

It's a tough duality for me to accept. I love my Kindle and I find the reading experience to be so much nicer than a physical book. On a recent year-long trip abroad, I was able to bring enough books for the entire trip and it weighed less than a single physical book. In one sense, it was great. Every book I read was something I wanted to read and I probably enjoyed them more because of it. On my first prolonged trip abroad back in the late 90s, I could only bring a couple of books with me. After I'd finished them, I had to find people to trade with to get new books. I probably didn't enjoy those books as much as ones I would've selected for myself, but I also ended up reading things I'd never have even considered reading before because I just didn't have any other options. There's a distinct part of me--the person that's able to look beyond the immediate fulfillment of my needs--that thinks that things were much better back in the days where stuff cost a bit more, it took more time to buy and I had to actually talk to a person to buy it.
Heat pumps are more efficient. A miner makes an inefficient heater.
Is best buy going out of business too? I had a surreal experience while trying to buy a camera lens at Best Buy. The employee in the camera section first directed me to phone camera addons (cool, but not what I wanted) then once explained that I wanted camera accessories (I gestured like I was taking a picture) I was eventually lead to the camera section. I was able to find the Nikon lenses eventually, and the employee returned... I was hoping he'd explain to me what lens would be good for zooming in, but instead he fiddled with the floor model until he managed to take a picture with it, showed me the picture and said, triumphantly, "camera." I gave up and left.
I feel like we rely on the implied threat of the law 1000x more than we rely on explicitly calling the law.
The ruling actually seems very reasonable. Someone took a photo and posted it on his social media account. The platform license on those accounts presumably allows others to share as fair use

Some for profit media companies then used the photo in their content without licensing hiding behind a technicality of it being served from a third party server and got stomped by the court.

Presumably if the story was an artistic criticism of the photo or described the photo, they would have been safe under fair use.
Everyone should have knowledge of how their company is doing.

If the numbers aren't good you should expect there to be changes. It's business. Always assume the worst
YouTube Comment Seen as Early Warning Left Little for F.B.I. To Investigate
That all sounds like a Getty problem.
Wasn't some of this prompted by Britain's effective technology embargo on America? I think there was a time we couldn't even legally import good woodworking tools for fear these things would allow the Americans to outgrow Britain.
dmso is also used as a steroid transport as an alternative to injection. I wonder if that is not part of the reason...
Ask HN: Does my idea have legs?
I am trying to validate interest in my idea. My landing page is here: https://hoggetaylor.github.io/tagged/ I hope that illustrates the idea well enough.
Is this something that you would use in your app? Does it solve a real problem?

(If this is an inappropriate place to ask for this type of feedback, could somebody point me to a useful alternative?)
If you don't mind me hijacking your comment, I'm actually currently trying to solve a problem through which I am trying to connect to people such as you. Essentially, Kiva has served the world's unbanked and underbanked through crowd-funding to some success, but ultimately to reach all the underserved we need to get the data we and our partners have to large regional and global banks so they can price the risk of these potential borrowers and bring in larger amounts of capital.

It would seem if we can get the data to banks such as MUFG in a usable format, then it presents a large opportunity, however how would one even begin to interact with such a large entity to explore it?
More accurate title would be, “Federal judge doesn’t understand how the internet works”
(a) higher sales volume and higher profitibality meant that they could afford some loss leaders.
(B) online not being as popular meant they were still a market for niches. Today niche interests are almost all entirely online
(C) The one big thing people are ignoring is that with the abundance of alternate media, books in general are almost certainly being read less. It's not just sales but actual consumptions of books that have likely dropped. The number of readers of certain niches has almost certainly reduced.
Can't she be both?
MongoDB supports 1) 2) 6) 7). Not sure what 3 and 4 is, but you can just add a new node and new data will be copied over, no need to restore data from snapshot, but you can restore from snapshot too, it shorten the time the replice become available.

Not sure what you mean by 5) though.

Anyway, replciation is strong point of MongoDB with oplog and I don't think Postgres can beat it.
"Capitalism" doesn't make any decisions. It's emergent behavior. People make all kinds of decisions and bets and tradeoffs, some of which work better than others and "win".

That doesn't mean we always like those outcomes, hence the need for regulations, social safety net, etc.

Overall, it's a pretty shitty system, since it means that some people are always losing, but it also seems to be the best we've got.
How long ago did you check? The font rendering on my Ubuntu installation is way better than "decent" and I prefer it to Windows' fonts.
I would love to hear a digital forensics expert weigh in on the doomsday prophesies surrounding this sort of thing. Yes,digital fakery is going to get more and more convincing, but we are not without weapons in the defense of truth. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5487389/
The story about the twins being raised by a prostitute (whose name was Acca Larentia, by the way) was already well-known in Roman times.

> Sunt qui Larentiam volgato corpore lupam inter pastores vocatam putent; inde locum fabulae ac miraculo datum.

> Some writers think that Larentia, from her unchaste life, had got the nickname of "She-wolf" amongst the shepherds, and that this was the origin of the marvellous story.

(Titus Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, I.4)

Probably, people just kept using the legend of the she-wolf to symbolize the might of Rome.
Right. I was a PM on Google Image Search and, from what I experienced on the team, would assume this is related to the Getty Relationship, not for users’ benefit
Great Products That Failed Because of Poor Marketing
Somebody help me out. Neither the article nor the quoted decision provides any rational as to how they jumped to linking would also be considered infringement. From my reading, the argument is that the sites made a conscience effort to display a copywritten image, tweet or not. Help me understand why displaying the tweet that included the image should not be infringement when displaying the image directly is.
When is the last time you used a major Linux distro?

From my experience, installing and using Linux has been the most straightforward, especially compared to windows.

And that's the point: we all have different experiences, so I think it's a bad idea to tell someone they are going to have your bad experiences of they try something new, because better software ends up getting a bad rap.
New lithium-ion battery design that's 2,000 times more powerful, recharges 1,000
Make Your Own Rules