skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If available talent pool were the #1 determinant, they'd be opening up in the Bay Area.

New York in particular is a very expensive talent pool with a lot of competition. Given Amazon's extremely strong brand, it's reasonable to think that they could benefit by opening almost anywhere else and then drawing talent in. Not only would those people get a lot more for their money, but Amazon would have relatively little competition, reducing turnover and wage inflation.
Don't buy chargers on Amazon
Depending on how you’re approaching the topic you may be interested in the self-publisher’s legal handbook - https://amzn.to/2RP0lF6
Amazon already has a sizable footprint in Ashburn, I would be surprised if they went very far away from there.
could be the USAF's unmanmed high orbit XB drone
>visual hacks

We were discussing "tricking" the computer vision component of a self-driving car, not getting software access. That's still a concern, but it's an entirely different set of security requirements that we already face in planes and existing cars.
NYC is very urban, but it isn't even the largest or most dense city in North America.

I think you just have a bias against heavy urban areas. Lots of people are comfortable living in large dense cities. Hundreds of millions, if not more, live in cities with similar levels of urbanization as NYC.
So does Queens.
> No one is transforming England into Pakistan. That is a false characterization.

London now has acid attacks almost twice a day now [1]. This NEVER used to happen anywhere in Europe, only Pakistan and some other Muslim countries. Why is this happening now?

So yes, in terms of crimes like acid attacks, London is becoming more Pakistan-like.

London is also turning into the Pakistan of homophobia, antisemitism, sexual assault, and street harassment.

It is foolish to think you can import that many people without also importing their cultural values. And we like to tell ourselves that we will only get the things we like, and nothing we don't.

I am not attacking people who are immigrants. Most of them left because they wanted to escape these things. But if we pretend that these problems don't exist, then we have no hope of addressing them.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/europe/london-acid-attacks-20...
Go type system in one page
I agree that dc makes sense for amazon because of us govt use of the cloud. But I am surprised to hear that nyc has that many developers, more than SF? There are more people in nyc by far, but more advanced software engineers?

Of course there are many advanced software programmers for the financial industries and other major intl companies in nyc. I'm not in the bay area, I'm in a secondary 'leading software city'. Is there a citation for this?
Obviously nowhere is going to be ideal for everyone. But judging by the number of people living in NYC, plenty are very happy with it.
I think it’s where he wants to spend time
On the other hand, word got out pretty immediately that it was the worst deal of that type ever.

And it was a Chinese company. Chinese.
IIRC even with the more pessimistic model the Earth will be habitable for humans for at least a few centuries. Do you have a link to an article with a shorter timeline estimation?
San Diego was one of the only ones to call that bluff in recent history.
Vallee is a serious person worth paying attention to, a rarity in that field. Spielberg used him as the model for that French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Another good book of his is "Messengers of Deception", expands greatly on the non-extraterrestrial idea.
At least they should 'invite' workers they need in terms of easy visa, easy sponsorship, good work environment, good pay, etc.

I am not sure whether Japan can attract high-skilled talent, when the latter have better chances elsewhere in the West. They need to compete with the West in terms of salary and work environment.

Otherwise, they can become like the middle east (Dubai/UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudia) in inviting Indians, Pakistanis, Philippinos, Africans, etc for jobs like construction, healthcare, etc. Give them better environment than the middle east, you can get people for service sector.

Or they can automate away everything.
I think that there are strong tendencies and actions towards democracies where convienent and possible.

Unfortunately the world is a messy place — ideological purity gets you no where.
An hour is too much. Ain't nobody got time for one hour commuting each way.
In my opinion, Bloomberg has become a fear mongering tabloid.

Have they resolved the calls to retract or strengthen the evidence supporting their apple/amazon hardware hack story?

Now a story about "the next great war"?
Many succeed with proprietary software while others worry and don't ship.
I would guess that it wasn’t his sole project for those 6 months, but rather something he kept incrementally improving until there was nothing left to improve.
Personally, I think I work pretty hard!

I don't think I slack off, I just recognize that I'm going to get more out of doing weight training than I will spending another hour on the same code-base I've been hacking on for the last 8 hours.

To be clear: I hate working out. HATE. IT. It is so boring!
I highly recommend the novels Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez, where he shows highly plausible attacks on our digital infrastructure.
This is about 10-15 year-old research, and although it's mildly less respected among psychologists as a "higher-level" concept, it still introduces a curiously cold framework for understanding how agents in a shared environment update their models on others and reality.
Most CEOs are rich enough to move. But they are also powerful enough to get the company to move to a location more convenient or appealing to them.
The same problem again - disconnected from reality humanities majors and liberal arts academics trying to regulate ecosystems they do not comprehend or understand.

They are guided by abstract nonsense instead of careful judgements based on the scientific method (measure, make and test your hypothesis).
Also the Patriots.
In New York, at least, this is going to be quite a mess. Many within the city - politicians included - are against it. But Cuomo, the governor of the state, is all in, and is planning to remove the city council from the decision:

http://gothamist.com/2018/11/12/amazon_cuomo_city_council.ph...

As if it needed to be said, there are other cities that would be a lot more receptive, and would benefit a lot more. Even just over the river in New Jersey would be an improvement. Just go there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437923
> Then why is porn so hard to find on YouTube?

because detecting nudity is a much much easier problem.
Sheesh, get with the agreed upon narrative. Microsoft was the new IBM, but then they got rescued by their new ceo Nadella. Then it was Oracle, but well hell, Oracle is still the new ibm. Google is trying hard to be the new ibm but they aren't quite there yet.
The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident - you need to compare the relative size of the +25k employees to the ~200k subset of residents that make $200k+ in NY, not the entire 8M pop.

Not to mention the knock-on effects of the many jobs the HQ will indirectly create - cleaning, food prep, waste mgmt, facilities, security, transportation, etc.

But yes, I agree that NYC is probably the city with the highest bargaining power in the US due to its size and economic diversification. And yet they still submitted a bid, even while Mayor de Blasio was badmouthing the company [1]

It will be interesting to see what the incentive package was - that's when we'll know just how much Amazon profited from the whole bid/selection process.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-de-blasio-amazon-hq2-de...
It’s been a while since I watched it, but only kind of. A major component of that movie is how he deals with and prioritizes NON work stuff (his kid.)
>Or discipline. None of which you can manifest by sheer force of will.

Having discipline is the same thing as having force of will.
As others have noted, looks like this is just running Lighthouse? That's been around for a long time.
No, but it does put them in plenty of of places that are just as unprestigious. As do plenty of other of cities.

Not all starred chefs are about chasing the high rent look or fine dining aesthetic. You don't have to be 11MP to get a star, or even three. Ko has two and is down an alley!
http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popu...

1. There are lots of other cases where we would agree there’s some form of silencing going on, even as a group has many supporters and rich, famous spokespeople

2. In fact, taboo opinions seem to promote a culture of celebrity

3. Fame lets people avoid social repercussions, but that doesn’t mean those repercussions don’t exist for ordinary people

4. If you spend decades inventing a powerful decentralized network to allow unpopular voices to be heard, sometimes you end up with unpopular voices being heard

5. When the IDW claims they are threatened, harassed, and blacklisted, people should at least consider that they are referring to the actual well-known incidents of threats, harassment, and blacklisting against them rather than imagining this is code for “they demand to be universally liked”

6. The IDW probably still censor themselves

7. Nobody in this discussion seems to really understand how silencing works.
Here's my end user take on it. I have moved from LastPass after almost 10 years and going to stick to it for two main reasons:

1. It's cleaner and doesn't feel bloated

2. It's open source.

However I wish:

3. They would have some consistency between mobile (iOS) and extension (Safari) UI (because imho extension actually looks like a mobile UI, I find iOS UI less useable)

4. They would do away with load time that I often notice when I open extension even though data is stored locally.

5. It doesn't maintain state or save info when I leave the extension popped up and then move away and come back to it. Also, It also doesn't save auto generated passwords with the "url" it was generated on which often renders password history useless.

6. For everything I have to reach all the way to the browser bar extension button and I don't get any option in the text field itself which was pretty good in LastPass.

I wanted to move to KeePass and while it has an excellent app for desktop (native MacPass is fantastic!), but I could hardly find anything even close to useable for Safari or iOS.
This Quora response uses US Bureau of Labor Statistics to show there are 92,350 programmers in the whole SF Bay area, compared to 62,530 programmers in the entire NYC municipal area.

So about 50% more in the Bay.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-work-in-Si...
A couple of years ago, I heard of a case where a guy was flying a small plane over James Bay in Québec in around 1978 and he saw what he thought were 5 fuel tanks on the ground, around 60' in diameters each. This was strange since this is in the middle of nowhere and these weren't even there a couple of days before and no road is leading to this place.

As he approached the location, the "fuel tanks" started moving in formation and flew upward at an impossible speed. They looked like fuel tank from above, but they were circular crafts.

Keep in mind, 5 objects of this size, moving at this speed would have displaced a lot or air, but there was no disruption, no noise.

There's some big hydro electric dams in this place and apparently these crafts are often seen hovering above the power lines.
The common use of SSNs, the continued existence of Credit Card numbers, and the Equifax hack make me gravely concerned that the Federal Government is not helping us harden our cyber defense.
It's just extracts of 3min, you cannot compare that to a full movie.
I don't think people get you are being sarcastic.
WW1 was not an accident.
Camp Fire Structure Status
This has to be a parody..
Sure, but he has lived in Seattle for a long time, what makes you think he wants to move to NYC?

The office in NYC is going to be nothing more than a big satellite office compared to the huge HQ in Seattle, so it's not like he's actually moving Amazon's HQ and himself to NYC. In fact I doubt he'd spend that much time there. Given his duties, he'll probably be in Seattle most of the time.

Also, I very much doubt the office in DC is there because Bezos is just dying to spend more time in DC ;-)
Studies have shown that most people consider arguments based solely on weasel words completely meaningless.
Really - they had to ruin New York City...
General Motors' future lineup will include flying cars
Especially since absolutely nothing has changed from then to now
Unicorns – China vs. US startups
NoVA is a great place to raise a family. For that reason, I'm actually kind of disappointed in Amazon choosing to setup HQ here. We have our own tech industry here, one that is very focused on and around professional services, and it works for us. We aren't defined by dude-bro culture--I think it's difficult to say that any East Coast city is defined by any specific culture. If Amazon comes to DC in the same way they set up in Seattle, it's not going to be a nice ride for the 20 million rest of us who live and grew up in this area.
Can you point us to some links (older than a few weeks) where SG says this. Everyone is a pundit when they know the outcome. Also what valuable private data did they gain from these cities exactly? Their proposed investment/infrastructure plans?? Amazon probably has better/more useful data than any local govt organization.
You seem to assume folks in spaceships would be scientists or part of a Star Trek like organized fleet. But what if some of them are tourists?

Americans in cars aren't part of some elite professional military or scientific service. Most Americans have cars. It's the norm here. And being a driver of a car in no way guarantees they are well educated, sophisticated, civilized types. There are even people driving illegally, without a license or insurance or whatever. That's part of why they can be such dicks to people they perceive as less powerful -- because they don't feel particularly powerful, etc. themselves.
The classic C90 version of the flexible array member (called the "struct hack") works fine in C++. So does the standard offsetof macro as well as containerof.

The classic struct hack looks like:

struct header {
size_t size;
char data[1]; // not [0]
};

the size of the structure to just before data is offsetof(struct header, data).

Automatic void casts are a misfeature in both languages; more so in C. In code that I control, I use a pointer to a character type as an "any memory" type, so that it requires a cast in both directions:

E.g.

typedef unsigned char mem_t;

a custom allocator or allocator wrapper will return a pointer to mem_t.

I use macros for casts, which compile to the classic C cast in C, and the more restricted casts in C++:

#ifdef __cplusplus
#define strip_qual(TYPE, EXPR) (const_cast<TYPE>(EXPR))
#define convert(TYPE, EXPR) (static_cast<TYPE>(EXPR))
#define coerce(TYPE, EXPR) (reinterpret_cast<TYPE>(EXPR))
#else
#define strip_qual(TYPE, EXPR) ((TYPE) (EXPR))
#define convert(TYPE, EXPR) ((TYPE) (EXPR))
#define coerce(TYPE, EXPR) ((TYPE) (EXPR))
#endif

The GNU C++ compiler has a cool feature: -Wold-style-cast. With this I can pinpoint uses of the casting notation, and then replace them with these macros.

The stupid void star thing and its conversion rules should never have been invented. C++'s treatment of it is more sane, at least, by working without a cast in only one direction.

What's really awful is official API's that use void star for opaque handles. The Kronos Group's OpenMax is one of these. You can mix up different kinds of handles for different objects and the calls will compile.
And also Netflix only really exist in terms of content in the US/UK, outside of that their library drops so much it's basically useless. Why would anyone pay for Netflix if they also have to torrent as well anyway?
Proprietary software is a cousin to technical debt. You're trading expedience for future risk. You simply never know when the copyright holder will fold up shop and leave you in the lurch.

Edit: If you think this is just an abstract risk, remember that Google shuts down popular and incredibly useful products so often it's become a meme around here.
A classic 'multidimensional' preference is a set of roommates all of whom have to decide both what space they want to take in an apartment and how much they want to pay for that space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s-YM-kcKME
I assume it's the same as the DFP/AdManager interface? Because every click means I can make a new pot of coffee.
Long Distance Relationships
Repl.it is hiring a frontend engineer to build devtools
There's always been a division between "(IRC) messaging" and "(BBS) forums", and the relevant influence-trees, with I think the biggest line drawn is how the return key is handled. From this one UX feature, every other differentiation is natural.

This division was fine, because they served different purposes. Messaging (return => send) was always short term, quick communications; Forums (return => newline) was always longer-form posts, sentences to paragraphs, in a single post. The forum for discussion worth archiving, and the messaging app to replicate daily communications.

But slack and its kin crossed that line. They pitch themselves as the utility of forums (archiving, search, "starring", etc), with the quickness of messaging (rapid response times, notifications, etc), and now everything is fucked. Forum-like conversation get stuffed into a Messaging application, and gets broken up into a hundred different messages (ala 1/20, 2/20..20/20 twitter multi-posts), perhaps collapsed into a single proper post but usually not; Logs get stuffed into it, into a separate channel whose sole purpose is to be muted. Documents and emails and any work gets stuffed into it, because it can be made to fit.

And naturally, the archiving, the search, the document storage, everything breaks down, and its awful. Until you realize that you can't use slack like slack wants you to. It's a better, smoother, more maintainable and convenient BBS forum, trapped in a messaging shell.

The return => send is feared, and it is a fear special to slack, and its many recent derivatives. Because slack crossed the line, without crossing it. Messaging apps should have return => send; slack (and its kin) should have return => newline, because it is not a messaging app. It is not IRC, and it is not counted amongst IRC's friends.

It is a forum in denial.
It's the greatest city, currently, in the USA for sure. In the history of the world, that's impossible to say.

Amsterdam is pretty dope for example.
I always thought that was such a strange reason. Never really got the obsession with having friends in other industries, which isn’t that hard to have in Seattle or Boston or Raleigh either.
Well, if our the earth hasn’t already been irreversibly destroyed already, it will be extremely soon. Now might be a good time to end observation.
Using OS X 10.4.11 here, the grep file is dated Jan 2006, the end of the grep man pages says "2002/01/22".

$ uname -v
Darwin Kernel Version 8.11.1: Wed Oct 10 18:23:28 PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.25.20~1/RELEASE_I386
$ grep --version
grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1

Other man pages: ed says 1993, sed says BSD 2004, cat says 3rd Berkeley Distribution 1995.
I searched Michelin Star restaurants in the US and looked through them and couldn't find any, then posed the challenge. So, yeah, no I didn't actually Google that and I should have.
That could be because you consume media on the bleeding edge of these trends.

"Hustle Porn" was quite popular in tech several years ago. It lost its luster and it's no surprise that the hustlers have now moved into broader markets.
I think it may have been a factor with NoVA. But the logical place for HQ2 was always NYC. There was a large confluence of factors, but the two most important being logistics and access to a super-sized community of technology experts. (No other city can really match NYC's transport links, by air, land, or sea. So if you were going for the whole "sun never sets on the British Empire" thing, then it would almost have to be NYC.)

NoVA is a little more perplexing? I think it may have been, as you said, DC is Bezos' home. And it's DC, so there's a lot of government type stuff there. I don't know? Maybe Bezos is the reason HQ2 was split into HQ2A and HQ2B? Because if you have NYC, I'm not sure why you need anyplace else?
These silly New Yorkers, with no sense of anything outside Manhattan.

Put aside government -- which is enormous -- and DC has:

- A long Internet history. MAE-East. UUNet. AOL. Equinix. Network Solutions. Microstrategy.

- Let's not discuss the one of the single largest tech regions in the country: the Dulles Technology Corridor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor

- A huge Big Data industry fed by (besides government) stuff like DC's ginormous genomics and bioinformatics industries, financial regulation groups, you name it. FINRA is in DC. So is Capital One.

- Amazon Web Services is already in DC.

- The three highest income counties in the country.
The point isn't that he can't afford houses anywhere (obviously he can), it's that the places he already owns houses in are places he enjoys spending his time in. So he'd want to locate additional offices in those places. He's probably not all that interested in spending time in, e.g., Dallas.
>The average salary for these employees will be many x greater than the average NYC resident

This isn't just an office for software developers so that's not likely to be true.
It's the second largest and the second densest behind Mexico City. Somehow I don't think Mexico City was in the running for HQ2.
2h of commute per day to get a backyard maybe good life quality for some. But not for everyone.
I think you're misinterpreting me. I'm literally sitting in NYC at the moment. I enjoy visiting it. I've lived here (briefly). I also travel throughout the US and elsewhere. I don't know how anyone else could seriously suggest that the sheer volume of blaring horns and crush of humanity is not at least somewhat unique in North America.

In my experience, Chicago comes closest.

LA is quite different.

I totally appreciate people are comfortable living in cities like this. I probably wouldn't be. But, if you are, more power to you. (Personally I live in the country.)
>The reason why anti-trust is based on precise economic definitions is that it leaves as little room as possible for the government to favor friendly players. When you need to prove harm to consumers, the bar is high, as it should be.

Yeah, I'm sure that allowing companies to merge right until the point where they make consumer's lives a living hell is great for the society and the economy.

>The classic example is: Coca-Cola has a 95% market share of the cola market in some countries. Does it mean it has a monopoly? No.

There is no such thing as "cola market". There are soft-drinks, and there are tons of them in every store. (Although, most people don't realize how many of those brands are owned by Coke or Pepsi, and what kind of shit they're doing to buy out and suppress the competition.)

But more importantly, soft drinks don't control any aspect of people's lives. Google, Facebook, and Amazon control not only what you can do as a consumer, but also how smaller companies can interact with you and how those companies run their businesses.

Here is a fun mental exercise for the reader. Imagine that you run Alphabet and want to destroy an arbitrary medium-size business that threatens you in any way. How hard would it be, considering you control pretty much all the search queries on the web and tons of other things?