skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I will say that the Glass Door reviews for the company are extremely accurate. I've found most Glass Door reviews to be fairly accurate.
Ancient Egypt seems to be the exception in history. Such reliable agriculture and continued population concentration around the Nile are very peculiar situations that have no parallels elsewhere.

If Egypt was truly superior, it really should not have been so easily conquered by Ptolemy and then Rome which both had a much less authoritarian society.
How to Learn Anything
Parent also did not offer any supporting evidence for their argument that it's unconstitutional.
Best line:

"I don't look at it [nature] as this morally benevolent place, it's a horror show"
Now where did I put my user manual?
I learned that a friend was (maybe still is) selling vitamins and probiotics through Amazon. I wasn't able to learn who was producing it only knew that it was made in US and most likey a neighbor.

He also was selling vitamin K, when asked my doctor about she said she would recommend not to take it, and the daily dose suggested is typically prescribed and usually taken one time.

That seriously made me cautious about it, literally anyone can start selling on Amazon and there is not easy way to figure out where things come from.
It should be a registered bond with a trusted source. You wouldn't trust escrow funds that weren't held by a trustworthy party if you were involved in real estate.
I was actually planning to work together with the translator since I'm also interested in any input he might have on making the app more friendly to Chinese users. Its not a game but its game-related and oriented to gamers so if the translator could help with things like Chinese gamer slang and culture that would be awesome, but I have to idea where to ask for a Chinese guy who wants to be a translator and its also a gamer heh.

Also would be good if he could (or has a friend who can) be my community manager for China since I don't want Chinese users to feel left out just because I can't speak their language.
I think it’s clear that parent was equating income taxes to theft. The article we are all nominally commenting on is about theft. Parent says he/she can get behind the movement against said theft and that there is a reason that income taxes were unconstitutional. I think I have enough evidence to base my conclusion on. If you really think that I’m wrong in thinking that parent believes that income taxes are theft then why wasn’t this your objection to begin with?
Following the same logic eBay would be liable for anything anyone sells on it. And Etsy too.

Expanding even further next in the line would be Craigslist, with the defense hinging on argument they don't facilitate payments like etsy, amazon or ebay.

So where do we draw the line?
I'm surprised SanDisk and other major brands that are getting their names dragged through the mud aren't doing something about it.
"Not paying wages according to the letter of the law is not the same as stealing money from people"

It absolutely, positively, is.

"and employers, like most people who cheat on regulations, often can't or won't shoulder the extra cost if those regulations are suddenly enforced, and will cut hours or people instead."

Why on earth does anyone think this is a valid argument? "If we don't let them cheat their employees and fuck them over, they won't offer a job so they can fuck employees over"?

"Workers are certainly being shafted but probably not anywhere near to the extent in reality as is being presented here in theory."

You're going to have to provide your own evidence for this statement.

"In any event, it's very different problem than property theft and shouldn't be compared as such."

Wrong. If anything, it's worse, because an employer committing wage theft is abusing a position of power over their employee.
It's always possible that a policy will have a bad outcome. In this case, I'd like to run the experiment. My guess is that the dynamics will be good for the economy: more cash in the pockets of workers means more cash flow through the economy, more activity, more growth, everyone wins.
Rich people don't use roads? What do they teleport nowadays? Rich people can't get sick? Serially? So when a rich person comes into the emergency room and the treatment costs ten million dollars but they only have coverage for five is it ok to let them die? By your reasoning it seems to be a dilemma. Rich people don't go to schools either? A ton of public school enrollment records beg to disagree. Anyway, rich people are generally not the majority that's voting against healthcare. People who are literally one job loss, accident, or injury away from homelessness outnumber them greatly (aka pretty much everyone in the lower and middle classes in America). The perspective of the rich is clear: profit off of and exploit everyone else. The perspective of the non rich who are anti healthcare is not.
There was a radio play (from ~20-25 years ago), where this is more or less the plot. Scientists find a cure to violence and unleash it on the world.

It was a chemical that makes everyone friendly. But what they didn't figure out was that it also makes you really stupid. So the scientists avoid the rain (because that's what transmits it), but after a while they all give into being stupid.
I know that all "Apple" wired headphones on Amazon are fake. The AirPods are probably genuine.
In the US, people actively seeking to work overtime hours for 1.5x their normal pay is fairly common in some industries, such as construction.
I think you overestimate the appeal of modern liberalism and the negativity of totalitarian rule.
When I buy something, the warranty included with the unit is from the manufacturer, not Amazon.
Correct, and this was spot-on why I didn't raise a bigger stink about the bonuses. You get your visa sponsored through them... and if you want Permanent Resident status you have to work there for about 2 years. I was told not to expect any sort of raise or bonus during this time -- why bother since they know they own you? Painful.
But they definitely don't only eat ticks.
Not quite the Netflix of online lectures, but there is http://videolectures.net. Quite some good stuff on there, e.g. lectures and conference videos on AI and robotics. The website feels very web 1.0 though.
Well yeah. As long as they can fight off these changes that fuck up their business model, they're still profitable.
"They are making a proactive choice to get out of bed, go to work, and do it again. They aren't being forced to work for their employer."

Because the alternative is homelessness.

"It is perfectly true, just not a very normal case. I'd put it to you that I was a bit more involved in the negotiating than you were."

No, it's not true. Just because they told you that, and you fell for it, doesn't make it true.

"Being expected to work unpaid overtime is obscene"

And yet, here you are defending the practice of wage theft.
Would Amazon then check and enforce the status/claims against the bond as part of processing each order? It's an interesting idea for sure.

It seems like this would put a total stop to inventory commingling, which does sound attractive, at an abstract level.
Bella Rossi beats Dragonlily
The entire interaction is via the Amazon interface and amazon.com storefront. Amazon inserts itself between buyer and seller every bit as much as Sears or Macys. So they let some fly-by-night Chinese merchants fulfill the orders? That definitely should not be the buyer's problem.
Because not everyone is able to do this. I'm glad that you are able to, but it's extremely weird that you're acting like everyone is able to do this, when reality very clearly disproves that idea.
Aaaah. Didn't know the source.

Also, I find it funny that it's the UK partner that published the press release and the paper, even though the actual research was done in Ukraine (where there's a lot of Soviet space industry legacy) and the paper seems to indicate that the Glasgow contribution was just to give them modern instrumentation.
Well seeing that most experts think that taking vitamins and are worthless anyway, it wouldn't really matter if they were fake....

https://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/news/20131216...

I'm not convinced that taking probiotics isn't junk science.
What's sad is that the great neighborhood bookstores never manage to own their spaces. That was just as true 40 years ago (when my favorite in a retired old-fashioned brick firestation went under.)

I'm probably wrong (never talked to an insider) but owning just doesn't seem to be in the DNA of the store owners to go for that. A shame for them, and for the fate of the thousands of books that make them special in the first place.
Actor framework for Rust
Forget about the main focus of the article... (I would prefer liability to lie with the manufacturer, no store online or offline is equipped to expertly and independently analyze and judge the safety of all the things they sell, but whatever.)

But how on earth can Amazon sell something and then lose track of the merchant, especially a foreign one? There seem to be so many necessary guarantees this breaks, not just product liability but obeying import/export laws, handling taxes, financial regulations preventing money laundering, and so on.

How is it legal for an American company to sell, or even list foreign products to American consumers where the "manufacturer is unknown"? Is there some kind of loophole in the laws?
So tell the prospective employer not to contact them, and sue the company if they say anything other than the dates of employment. They don't have a right to tank your future employment chances because they're upset you called them out for breaking the fucking law.
It's along the lines of the opening to "Trainspotting" a famous novel and film [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trainspotting_(film)
I think since in most cases you're running things like that on dosbox, and without network in most cases, whether they come infected or not likely doesn't matter much.
There's a lot to like about Reason. The built-in instruments really hit a sweet spot between flexibility and ease of use. And the semi-modular design makes it easy to do things that are hard or downright impossible in more conventional DAWs. And there are some great rack extensions like Nostromo that don't really have any direct counterparts in the VST world.

I also like the way that the blocks method of arranging a song works.

Reason also has some serious shortcomings though like a very basic piano roll and, at least lately, very bad performance. I'm not sure what happened there because it used to be the most efficient DAW on my system by far but now it uses 2-3x the CPU that Logic or Live do, at least on my machine.
US customs seizes Ohio family's life savings at airport
It looks like 8% of children are food insecure, for example. That’s awful but we’re also a lot further along than the 20% figure in TFA.
It is worth remembering that TV-show style suspect hunting is a rather small portion of the activity of the cops, lawyers and judges of the justice system. I'd suggest the exercise of spending a day watching an average court function. Most of the cases have no facts in question - or maybe the defendant will claim something and be immediately shown wrong. Instead, it's draconian social work for the extremely dysfunctional and those in the wrong place at the wrong time. When there are facts in question, it's usually about "how exactly do this bad thing happen" with who was there make it happen only occasionally in question.

I'd imagine the main place this increased surveillance would matter is the cat-and-mouse competition between the business of selling illegal drugs and the business of making stopping them seem like a plausible idea. How, supply and demand will likely keep the supply there but I'd assume this supply will be even more under the control of crooked cops.
Not really, and it doesn't distract from the content in any meaningful way.
Yeah I'm sure Google won't abruptly dump an ecosystem, that's so unlike them.
Yeah, there is red tape, but government contractors make this a core part of their business, so the relative risk is low.

For a new company, the risk is relatively high, because there's a lot of up front work that has to be done (auditing, compliance, security, etc). But once that is ironed out, larger contracts become easier and easier.

And then the only real risk is on a "firm fixed price" style of contract where the contractor assumes all the risk of product delivery. But many other are "time and materials" where the risk is shifted onto the government. If you fail to deliver a product, you're not on the hook because the government was paying for "time and materials" not the end product itself.

So yes, google may actually lose money on a $9MM contract, but probably not on the next $100MM contract.
That was my first takeaway too. It’s one of the biggie no-no’s in banking to not know the customer. I’m at a loss on why that would be ok here.

I’m also fine with the manufacturer taking the liability but for the retailer to say we don’t know, is at best incompetence and at worst a middle finger to the US consumer.
That solution has a complexity problem. It's technically a constant-time overhead (since there's a fixed number of letters in the alphabet, so the complexity is O(26N)->O(N)), but it still seems like an oversight.

'not in alphabetlist' when run on a Python list is an O(N) operation: https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity. You want a constant-time-search data structure, such as a set or dict.

'alpbabetlist.index(ch)' is another O(N) operation. 'index' searches the whole list.

Additionally (this is a lesser concern), appending to 'letterpos' repeatedly (as in 'letterpos += some_string') can be extremely inefficient on memory. Efficient string concatenation in Python has a number of approaches (http://codingdirectional.info/2018/03/20/return-the-position...), but storing a list and concatting its contents together at the end of the function would be a good start.
> My favorite tactic in Dune II was to build concrete tiles right up to the enemy's base and start planting turrets.

Ha! We've done the same thing and gave it a dumb name: "bagging them in" or "baggin em in". That name came much later as we used a similar tactic in command and conquer where you built sand bags up to their base and walled them in. You built a snake from your base and sell the tail as you built along. Once you reach their base you simply walled off their entrances or their ore fields. The developers never thought if this and their AI didn't know how to handle it's own base being walled off.

My brother and I had another trick for Dune II: enemy's move slower if off screen. If you were running from a faster vehicle, you scrolled until the enemy vehicle was out of view and kept it off while following your units.
Except the gun nuts facilitate totalitarianism because they don't give 2 shits about freedoms other than guns.
Inside my ‘haunting’ time as the first American to study in North Korea
I understand that making the shop rather than the manufacturer liable for such a thing would prima facie seem strange.

But since amazon profited from the sale, where I'm from (Australia) they might need to show they weren't recklessly indifferent to the safety standards of the manufacturers they stock - especially this one, but also as a policy in general.

Perhaps there is some useful question here, seeing the number of comments regarding fake, counterfeit or unsafe products. Might these outcomes be "reasonably foreseeable"? Again, where I'm from this could cause Amazon some issues - I only hope other legal systems have similar principles.
This isn't a hypothetical; you can already buy stuff from tons of Chinese companies online -- good luck getting any recourse in a Chinese court if you have a dispute.
also because it's whataboutism containing references to things widely regarded as stains on American history.
Amazon is known to mix stock based on the EAN/UPC. If a merchant is inserting counterfeits that bear the same barcode as the original, they will be mixed together with the real thing with no traceability, and buyers could end up with the fake even if they bought it from a legitimate seller.
Good question.

- Scott Bell
Well, what is a personal blog? My blog was mostly fun tech stuff, but it attracts dev business. So, I would say it is a commercially blog.
Without looking it up, I don't think I'd like vampire spiders very much either.
Which doesn't make sense. At what point during the cold war was America close to collapse?
link is wrong on second book
That's purely front-end tech if I'm not mistaken. My question here is primarily about the back-end aspects of a project (especially syncing local and production environments, etc.).
#MeToo

- Scott Bell
Wouldn’t owning their real estate in New York require access to tens of millions of dollars in cash? Where is a bookshop owner going to get that? It sounds more like a practical barrier to doing that rather than a choice thing in their ‘DNA’.
Oops, looks like I'm not familiar with ActivityPub :)
No, the US just goes and bombs their homes instead.

and at home the US strips away freedoms from their own people with the justification of "national security".
link is wrong on second book

- Scott Bell
I totally agree with you on that. But the whole point was that there is much certain possibility for things to go wrong with inexperienced developers. I won’t quote the comment in the reply below, but that is the thing...

edit: typing on the phone, sorry
If particles are “just” particles, how would you solve the problem of two objects without spatial extent (point masses) being infinitely unlikely to ever collide? Among other things. In treatments I’ve seen, this is always explained in terms of particles “actually” being fields.
Paywall removed https://outline.com/E8VPNv
Agreed and I agree with him if that's what he meant, which is interesting to consider the different response each one got.

Much like gun manufacturers aren't responsible for their use, I can't imagine a platform which lets vendors set up their own shops online becoming responsible for what is sold by the vendor.
This is a good bad article to read so I can read this nice blog.

- Scott Bell
I recall reading about this idea (but not using CRISPR, natch) in New Scientist back in the 1990's.

They covered off the precautionary principle / unintended consequences concern by proposing to retain a breeding stock of the target species in a closed system (say a greenhouse).

You'd be looking at a few years to deplete or render extinct the wild stock, during which time you could be sure the malaria pathogen was absent from your breeding stock.

Once malaria, and the modified mosquitoes, are confirmed absent from the wild, you have the option to re-introduce. Naturally the option also exists at any earlier time if the species turns out to be more important than originally determined.
The article doesn't say that Amazon lost track of the manufacturer; it says that the customer wasn't able to get that information from Amazon.
Your argument does not preclude selective policing; if for example policing on Han ethnicities remains sufficiently light, this can remain indefinitely. Slavery as well as oppression of minorities used to be seen as part and parcel of human society; one should not doubt so easily that oppressive regimes can be sustainable
Amazon is an Authorized Apple Reseller. They sell plenty of stuff, iPods, Airpods, Macs, Apple Pencil directly. Then, there are many third party sellers, some of which are likely selling fakes and some selling legitimate goods.
This strikes me as a description, possibly even a caricature, of what collective bargaining has ahieved in certain scenarios.

It may even describe what is an inevitable outcome, but, absent compelling evidence, even that is merely conjecture.

Otherwise, there's nothing inherent to collective bargaining that requires any of the features you mentioned. Even "collective" doesn't have to mean collectivism in the socialism/communism sense.

> assembly line type work where workers are literally interchangeable

Anecdotally, I've read the observation (perhaps even complaint) here on HN that employers still have a tendency to prefer their workers be more interchangeable than intelligent or individually productive.

Even if this attitude is minority, but a large minority, it creates an environment where unions seem desireable.
If you can’t find work, create your own. Worked for me and I’ve been at it happily for a few years now. Best decision ever made.
In Firefox you can turn off styling and see the content.

Menu: View -> page style -> no style
If I could like this comment ten times I would. You start stuffing your earnings report with little extra revenues and then all of the sudden you forgot about your original customer while someone else moves in.

Then comes the part where you try to hold your customers captive or ditch any “good company” barriers preventing larger revenue. Interesting with Apple because of thier cash position,this could occur over a long timeline (assuming this is whats happening).
Civil war implies it was a local phenomenon -- it was not. Foreign invaders occupied territory which has thankfully been restored to the democratically elected government.
Scroll down to page 3 for the story of the Vasa, an over-developed sailing ship that sank a few hundred yards into its maiden voyage.

Tangent: the Vasa Museum in Stockholm is one of my favorite museums in the world. Indeed, Stockholm may be the best cities in the world for museums outside of Washington, D.C.
I know this not to be the case. Many of them are but there is some legitimate inventory there, I know several people in the industry.
They do get treatment identical -- any Han committing the same crimes would be exposed to the full force of the law.
Conservatives! Small government! Let the market decide!

What a load of rubbish. This just goes to show that modern conservatism is all about an in group that's protected, but not bound, by law, and an outgroup that not protected, but is bound by law.

We all now have license to laugh heartily at any conservative who wants to cut regulation to allow markets to work.
The Defeat of Reason
very good point on the "addresses compare == iff same object" rule.

In that case though, I think clang is right to optimize the callee (but it does introduce a problem in the caller) :

the only place you could do the equality check and observe the rule being broken is before the callee returns since the lifetime of its variable is bound to the call.

It seems that clang will not let the return pointer alias a local in the caller except when the call is the initialization of said local.

So if the caller goes :

foo x; leak(&x); x = returns_foo();

the memory will be temporary stack (and then memcpy), thus upholding the rule. (and it seems to me that this inefficiency is really required to respect the standard if we actually leak the pointer)

in the case :

foo x = returns_foo();

clang will pass the actual address of x down but that's before the object exists (and its address cannot be known yet) so the rule is still fine.

I stand corrected though, this does mean that RVO would be useful for C as well, as a way to relax the aliasing rule.

edit: nevermind that, in the first case it's perfectly legal to read/write foo through the pointer downstream so you cannot make the optimization anyway.
Bill to regulate Elon Musk’s flamethrower is being held in committee
RAII was created as a solution to the problem of C++ code not releasing its resources when an exception happened. By putting the resource release in a destructor this is fixed through piggybacking on C++'s semantic of calling destructors when objects go out of scope, even through exceptions.

To put it another way, RAII is a hack which co-opts one semantic to cover the drawbacks of another semantic. Without exceptions there's no need for RAII because there's no problem to solve.
You are in no position to argue or decide that.