skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the beginning, especially about the deck chairs as its an expression I often use. Let's be clear its people like me who killed Barnes and Noble not its executives. I have two or three sets of bookshelves downstairs in my office filled with books, many of which were bought at B&N. I spent hours sipping coffee in their cafe's. Then I bought my kindle. And I basically have not been back since. When I do buy a physical book it is typically a rare math or finance book which B&N is not going to carry. And my life is richer for it. I bought two books today for my kindle that were mentioned on a podcast I was listening to. B&N is just a dead company that has not gone out of business yet and I agree that there is little to nothing that can be done to keep it existing in its current form.

The company today is only worth $340M dollars. Maybe it could restructure as some sort of higher end boutique store, but that would probably require a significant downsizing and realignment. Its hard to see a positive way forward but maybe someone else will.
It doesn't look like GPs friends have been spending $20 per week on their hobbies. You don't build a render farm over 10 years.
We Flew Around the World to Watch the Annual Race to Tear Down the iPhone
That message is there every time I go to the website. It's been 3 weeks and support has still not resolved my issue. Yea, more people are using the service now, but they are struggling really hard at client services.
I doubt it. Belief and passion may be necessary, but they're not sufficient. How do you pick this person? Based on the strength of their belief? Because if it's based on their experience and track record, you're back to where you started: this person likely has better alternatives and is smart enough to want to be compensated for the opportunity cost they're incurring.

Also, it's all well and good to say this when it's not your money on the line, but the board is responsible to the shareholders, and I doubt they're interested in taking a chance on some unproven person who has "belief in the company" as their primary qualification.
Elon would just be happy that he spurred some rocket competition, so he would let you keep it.
Not the GP:
Maybe because you need to install Chrome to use that.

I have a Chromecast, but don't use/have/want Chrome.
Open-source, client-side, Bitcoin wallet generator made with React  lmkwyt
That was seriously well written.

I don't normally read Tumblr posts but the pacing and the way they peppered the images throughout; very well-made piece.
When I started coding, I installed linux one day. I didn't use windows again for like 6 months.

It seems to open up a new world, where you can program what you need to use. Sure you can do this on windows, but on linux it feels like you're closer to the smell of sawdust.

Also, when you likely deploy your server to something like AWS, it'll probably run on linux, so there's that consistency.

You feel like you live inside the internet. Because the internet runs on linux.

I'm typing this comment from a debian laptop. This laptop isn't super fast, but debian makes it seem totally fine, whereas windows makes it sad. (speed boost).

I'm thankful when I use linux. When I see all the lines of computer code at startup and during install, I think of all the time someone put into that, wow, so glad.
I would say types. I think types have been really a lot of help to me, coming from mostly dynamic languages. It forces you to think about your problem more than just throwing some code together. Another thing I enjoyed is easier concurrency. But apart from that, I feel like its a matter of choosing the right tool for the right task.
Yes this is creative destruction, but Amazon is able to sell at a loss because Wall St. sees the infinite dollar signs at the end of this road when they’ve literally killed off all competition. Selling at a loss is anti-competitive and should get them hammered by anti-trust, but somehow the US government has decided that, in this generation at least, monopolies are fine as long as they don’t raise prices.

As a customer I like Amazon, but as a citizen they deeply worry me.
No idea, maybe a lot from the system headers. However, it was 20,000 lines of code that survived the preprocessor, 11,000 of which were inline or template from the project itself.
A lot of people don't know that adaptive optics is meant for atmospheric usage only.
The Singular Pursuit of Comrade Bezos
I understand spending 10 grand on a hobby, but not when you're starting out.
> publication bias – the tendency for positive but not negative results to be published

Many years ago Feynman expressed concern and regret about the harm that causes to experimental physics. One can imagine it being a far bigger issue in some of the social sciences, where there is nothing nearly as consistently apolitical as Nature to gradually separate reality from comforting delusion.
Waterstones came back, and recently, too. [0] They're a similar company that faced similar issues - it CAN be done. This is about a lack of vision and will from the management to re-position the company, make hard cuts, and tap into the best things it had going for it. Stripping the company down to book value assets with no repurposing or new goal is what you do when you've given up and become a liquidator. Even "Kodakcoin" is a better plan.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-...
Not really. Not for the long term. Certain independents and specialty shops -- sure. We still have record stores here and there, but the big chains are all gone.
I've done a lot of hiring, and have found that salary demands are weakly inversely proportional to performance.

That is to say, people whose salary demands are at the lower end of the salary range for that career have outperformed those whose demands are at the higher end.

My sample size is small but significant. Food for thought.
“Even sweeter, those vendors don't sit on my order for a week for funsies like Amazon does if you resist their PRIME offering.”

What’s the deal with this? I turned off prime a couple of years ago and it certainly feels like they’re intentionally slow processing orders.

For books, I only buy used and try to pick nearby sellers. Often the media mail shipment will show up in 2-3 days. Pretty great.
Never saw ebook book buying coming? What? In the '90s we were selling books for the Palm Pilot. I remember when a sample of the Rocket showed up at the office. We thought, hey, now maybe people will start buying ebooks!

I also remember when Amazon first started selling books online, and they were getting their data from Books in Print. Despite the name, BIP lists a lot of books that are not in print. Some effort was required to get them to clean up their data.

In those days, B&N was rapidly expanding their superstore system, and trying to drive out the independents by, you know, discounting. And we said, hey, once they've gotten rid of the competition, those discounts will go away. And they did.
"... find and upsell books"

What can be easier than using the Amazon search bar? And as far as upwelling goes, Amazon's ML-driven 'suggestions' algorithm results often seem to interest me.
Thanks for mentioning FilmStruck! It looks interesting, and getting foreign movies is not easy. So I see this as a great option (though yet another steaming service is something I'd rather not have at this point).
Perhaps there's a difference in that embeds can display the content without directing the viewer to page. Consider:

* Embedding a copyrighted image.

* Linking to the original page that hosts said image.

In the latter case the copyright holder would still monetize of of, say, ads hosted on their website. Whereas in the former the copyrighted work would likely be displayed without the chance for the copyright holder to monitize.

I'm more surprised that Twitter doesn't have a clause where all users waive copyright to any posted on their website. Otherwise essentially all social media platforms would constantly be infringing. I upload my profile pic to Facebook, I can't turn around and sue them for the fact that it's displaying this image to all other Facebook users viewing my profile.
So explain how you can stand next to your microwave then? Did you think the size of the holes in the metal mesh of the window was consistent across all microwaves by coincidence?
I love wandering around in my local B&N and in my local independent bookstore, but I don't find it at all hard to believe that this sort of thing is a small niche that is not sustainable in the long run. I find it harder to believe that you find this hard to believe.
If I were you, I'd just start a weekend project and see where it leads you. On a weekend project, you can make any change you want without anyone telling you not to. You'll find what you like.

Another great technique is looking back on your life and find some peak experiences. "Start with why" is a pretty cool course to go through, but you could also just reflect on your own. Find your best experiences, and do similar things.
Fye is still around.
That's one of a variety of explanations but no one seems sure of the actual answer, e.g. [1] In any case, it was widely used for a long time.

[1] http://archive.saila.com/journalism/thirty/
While people are pointing out your mistake, it's worth bringing up the fact you were certainly thinking of: when it comes to static electric fields, a Faraday cage complete protects the interior from external charges but does nothing to shield the interior from the external charges. However, we are considering non-static electric fields and in particular ones at high frequencies.

However, I think the fact that the Faraday cage is not symmetric when it comes to static electric fields is very interesting. Ask yourself this: how does the cage know what "inside" versus "outside" means? You know the old joke where a mathematician has to enclose the greatest area with a given fence and so she takes the fence and wraps it around herself and declares "I am outside the fence." Well, why can't I declare myself to be inside the Faraday cage and suddenly get the benefits of its shielding?

You might say that the difference is that the outside has the "boundary" of the universe and that makes it distinct from the inside. [1] But we don't yet know that the universe isn't finite and wrapped up on itself spatially, so if that were the difference, then isn't a Faraday cage experimental evidence in favor of the universe not being finite? I think therein lies the answer: if we wanted to actually use this as an experiment, we would have to place a charge outside of the Faraday cage and wait for sufficiently long time that the electric field is effectively static. However, for our experiment to work, we would have to wait so long that the electric field becomes static on the scale of the entire universe. And so no, the Faraday cage is not an experiment we can practically perform to measure the shape of the universe and the difference is the obvious one: the exterior is the larger one and is simply just "big enough" that we can't ever wait for the EM fields to settle down in the exterior like we can on the interior.

[1] Mathematically, this come in as the fact that the Poincare lemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_and_exact_differential_... requires a "contractible" domain. The exterior of the cage is not contractible, so we are not guaranteed to be able to use the integral forms of Maxwell's equations over the exterior of the cage. However, the interior is contractible.
Is there a guide just for using the actix framework that explains what are actors, how they are different from other abstractions and the pros and cons?
I've heard they take ANY interference very seriously. That's why HAM radio operators are licensed, and if you operate outside of your allowed bands, yes they'll probably show up.
For the record, I do like that idea. I recently started working remote, and while I like my office it's nice to go to a coffee shop and get out of the house for a while. But, the WiFi usually sucks and it can be too noisy. A quiet place with decent WiFi and coffee would be superb. I don't know what books other professions need, but it'd be pretty neat to go and checkout TAOCP (or something) and do some work for a while. Like a library meets coffee shop meets BYOD internet cafe, or something. Idk.
I think it's valid to point out that this reaction was caused by cutting one of it's nerves that controlled skin color.
*paint
I don't think it's a good idea for people like me..

I'd rather try to figure out a way to make my career (my skills) fun again. And find a way to get curious.

Or, to expand slightly past my skillset ( like management ), and learn that skillset, but as a superset of my existing skills.
Barnes and Noble had a huge high-margin section, just like Best Buy did... their ridiculous physical video and music section. I think the availability of streaming services did as much to hurt those "book" stores as reasonable competition from Amazon.
Except, you know, lying about the upcoming layoffs.
Learning ReasonML, Part 2 – Integrating ReasonML into a React Application
Giving the OP the benefit of a doubt I'm really just learning to program and have many of the questions the OP has asked. Reading the comments to these questions does actually help me make more informed decisions based on the knowledge and experience of you guys. Gaming or not they are of benefit to some.
You're in luck. https://d3vr.github.io/viewimage/
Apple has a sky high budget for shoplifting. They have no issue with somebody walking out with an iPhone case because it implies they bought an iPhone.

Barnes and Noble would be decimated by that.
Is that ironic? Amazon has also become the electronics retailer as well. I don't recall the last time I've bought anything at Newegg or Monoprice, or BestBuy. It's basically Amazon or bust, at this point - if I desperately need something right now, I'll gamble on Walmart maybe having it in stock, but chances tend not to be good, and the selection awful.
I'm confused by the duality in your comment.

You say that in 10-20 years, tons of jobs are going away. You say it seems very unlikely the American political system is going to address it without violence in any successful manner.

But you also say that you think we will adjust and adapt and thereby keep the work a job, make a living system that we have. I don't see how that optimistic result follows from the pessimistic future you predict. And I think we're talking about the same problem - a period of volatility due to a lack of available work and a refusal to acknowledge the failures of our current system - but looking at different resolutions. I don't accept violence to restore status quo as the only possible solution.

This is what I think: Your predictions are relatively spot on, if nothing changes, but we have the opportunity to change them if we act now. If we install a government dedicated to addressing these problems, if we begin to think seriously about solutions rather than spending time repeating the same arguments about whether the problem exists at all, we can fix it. Yes, we've failed to do this on other things (e. g. climate change, North Korea, etc.) until it was more than a little too late, but the fact our society still exists and functions suggests that we must have had some success, too.

Remember that it's only in the last couple centuries that we transitioned from most countries being monarchies or what we'd now call dictatorships to most countries being at least some level of democracy. It's only in the last couple centuries we've tried systems of economy and government other than direct rule by a ruling cast. Some of those systems didn't work (full communism, fascism); some have worked out quite well thus far (modern capitalism, democratic socialism a la much of Europe), and of course many are in the middle. We can work out systems which are better still, and we can transition into them without violence or (too much) societal strife, but only if we can at least acknowledge that it's necessary or even just wiser to do so than to try and maintain the system we've got just because it's what we have.

TL;DR: You're right that we don't know what's coming, but, in my opinion, it's a mistake to assume we can't decide for ourselves if we move quickly.
Like /u/user_simulator bot on Reddit: https://github.com/trambelus/UserSim
That’s the reasoning behind the Erlang “let it crash” philosophy. It’s not advocating poor programming; it’s asking processes to handle whatever issues they can within reason, but otherwise to crash and be restarted by their supervisor process, rather than try to carry on in a probably erroneous state.

It’s also a recognition that in complex systems, something unanticipated is going to go wrong sometimes, and rather have a plan for handling the failure than pretend that the system will never hit a really bizarre failure mode.

Your circuit breaker analogy made me think of this.
You're just inventing your own terms no one else uses.

There's a page called "Monad (functional programming)" on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming) suggesting that the term "moand" or "moandic" is widely used and understood.

There's no page called "contextual function."

There's a page called "Orthogonality (programming)" on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality_(programming) also suggesting that the term "orthogonal" is widely used and understood.

The page for "Unrelated" is about a movie.

There's a page called "Immutable Object" on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object suggesting that the term "immutable" is widely used and understood.

"Fixed" and "constant" have distinctly different meanings from "immutable."
Sure, there's room. Amazon just opened a giant store right here in Manhattan. You can even ship your Amazon packages there, or pay for books online and pick them up on your way home from work. Plan on seeing more Amazon stores. They'll probably buy up a few B&N spaces.
In the end, you either play by their rules and get to play, or you don't, you get kicked out and don't get to play. They saw that happen with Google in China and saw native players take hold -even if they were initially inferior.

While it is submission (morally, politically, legally, etc.) it's the long game to play, otherwise you risk not having any future say --unless there is an internal revolt which upends things. But even then there is no assurance the new shire reeves will play nice with the alien enterprise.
You need compensation against seeing for very, very big space telescopes, the kind that can resolve a moon in orbit of an expoplanet. IIRC there are reasons against using adaptive optics there, so you might need speckle interferometry there.
I think it's sort of like first-class flying. There's no logistical reason for not boarding the plane rear-to-front, but you can get people to pay for the privilege of being first, so why not? Non-Prime customers are second priority, and expected fulfillment is adjusted accordingly.
Below, steveklabnik claims these things are miniscule. Are you really sure you know what is actually slow?
> There's just nothing about the retail experience at B&N that's even worth the effort to drive there and park.

The last book I bought at B&N wasn't so long ago. They pulled it off the shelf and had it waiting for me when I arrived. I appreciated being able to preview it to decide it was worth buying.

I don't have a local B&N anymore, but a local independent book shop is pretty good. They've ordered new books for me to preview too.
I don't think Google likes it either.
"These changes came about in part due to our settlement with Getty Images this week."
If you read the article, I think that is a reference to the later passage where he notes that even RL models that are considered "working" still fail 30% percent of the time because the models are so unstable that their success depends on the random seed. If that's the level required, then he is allowed to say with confidence that they don't work, because even if it sometimes would, that would be way under 30% of the cases.
>>And as soon as Amazon can make the same amount of money while employing fewer people, they will do so. Every company does. The cycle repeats, only this time more people lose and fewer people gain.

Not every company does, every public company does. It seems hard to believe in this day but there are some privately owned family-run businesses that care deeply about their employees and aren’t looking to cut labor costs as a means of profitability.
You go to a rare school that isn't a scam.
>As a side note: people often want to know why Amazon’s prices are so much lower than B&N’s, and why B&N doesn’t price match. There’s a lot of different reasons, but the biggest is that Amazon loss-leads their books: that is, sells them at a loss, then makes up the money with expensive add-ons, like Echos or Kindles or other non-book stuff.

Well no, Kindles are breakeven and Amazon makes it up by selling more books (digital ones with good margins though)
Not to mention that B&N went in big on ebooks. B&N's Nook platform was the only competitor comparable to Amazon's Kindle ecosystem.

It didn't work out, of course, but that's something very different than missing the coming tide of ebooks altogether.

> Imagine if B&N could compete on price with Amazon

One of the points of the article is that they can't*, because Amazon has other lines of business and B&N does not. So Amazon can use the revenue from those other businesses to swallow losses on book sales in order to drive out competition.
I dream of 8 seconds :^)

Really, I regularly get broken links on an android phone from Google News. It's hilarious to watch it try and resolve, if the article is more than 15min old. A direct link to the article just works. New links work. I'm guessing it's something similar to what you describe...
I'm not going to argue on the stats, but some assumptions you have made are that I (or anyone else commenting here) live or have a livelihood in the U.S. or that I (or anyone else commenting here) can afford the $30 or so a month. I won't go into details, but these three services alone are not adequate, and the remaining $30 as per your calculation wouldn't be enough. There are great shows from HBO, ShowTime, etc. For someone who likes good content from different sources, the current crop of services are not yet suitable (speaking solely for myself).

FWIW, I do have Netflix and Amazon Prime, but still don't get everything I'd like to have (and the bigger headache of knowing what's where adds to the frustration). Of course, I have seen people make the argument that one shouldn't wish for things one cannot afford. For digital content though, I believe the companies are leaving a lot of money on the table by not expanding their customer base and making it easier to subscribe and use (vs. say, downloading content from elsewhere).
I've been using cointracking.info up until now, but this is just amazing. Great work! Will you be supporting Huobi in the near future? And can you add a "When Lambo" indicator next to each crypto asset?
That's interesting, but I'm pretty skeptical, and I don't even think it's relevant here, unless you were hiring executives for large but dying companies?

Here's more food for thought: the five biggest companies in the US are all data-driven tech companies that are renowned for paying ridiculously high compensation. Why wouldn't they apply your framework to both save on hiring costs and boost performance?
CommonMark is a useful, high-quality project
If there is such space, it will have to be run by kiosk and a few minimum wage employees.

B&N's 'competitive advantage' today is not experienced staff. I can't ever recall an employee up-selling significant amounts of merchandise, or having a customer relationship that might move a needle.

Like Sears, it has real estate and a terrible retail position. If you treat the stores like mini-warehouses, with Amazon-warehouse-worker-hours, it might work. My guess is that failing to staff-up for the holidays was, seen charitably, a way to get the full-timers through the holidays.