skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others have pointed out, the guy may be pretending to have misinterpreted the way the program works in order to reduce his penalty. Other than his statement, there's no indication that Amazon does pay drivers to return packages never assigned to them. He may also have genuinely misinterpreted the rule and been unlucky enough to get caught his first time trying to game the system.

Even if their system has the flaw described by the theif, their package tracking system would be pretty poorly designed if it can't be trivially modified to prevent drivers from returning packages not assigned to them.

I imagine they also datamine non-delivery and missing package rates by neighborooh, day-of-week, driver, and a few other factors and flag suspicious drivers. This probably means having a given driver cover a patchwork of different neighborhoods on on irregular schedule to reduce the effect of a driver being unlucky enough to get assigned a high theft neighborhood on a high theft day of the week.

If they find the package return rates are really too high, it's easy enough to just pay all drivers to return to the warehouse at the end of their shift. However, that probably costs significantly more and is inconvenient for drivers.
> If you accept 'areas of preference' don't you also accept that other positions, even those in direct conflict with your own, are not necessarily wrong or false, but could simply be different?

If you accept areas of preference, then your beliefs in those areas are not of the form ‘X is right’ or ‘X is wrong’ but ‘X is my preference’ or ‘X is not my preference’. A statement about someone else's preference in that area does not conflict with yours even if the preferences differs (‘A prefers X’ does not contradict ‘B prefers not-X’.) Any statement of universal truth by a third party in the area of preference conflicts with the belief that it is validly an area of preference, OTOH, and cannot simultaneously be viewed as anything but incorrect while believing the area to be validly one of preference.
The logic is that Facebook is currently worth $1000 but would be worth much less because of the many people who would stop using it if it had that cost.
Delta IV Heavy Launch – Vandenberg AFB – 5:44pm PST
I don't understand why this wasn't the original strategy. Surely even in 1998, Steamboat Willie itself wasn't making much money. Trademarking Mickey makes much more sense.
That defines the voting system, but not governance and representation

It's also almost exclusively used by other software foundations like the Debian SF so if anything this just proves my point that programmers by and large are not equipped and do not invest time to become equipped for discussing governance.
Sears Bankruptcy Battle Tests Credit Default Swaps Market
> companies founded after 1996

Not trying to be a dick, but neither Amazon nor eBay meets that criterion. That said, thanks for the link.
I think people in TX and FL would have a hard time defending themselves with Stand Your Ground because a central part of that defense is proving that your only other option would be retreat. An unarmed package thief pretty much negates that as a defense.
I thought the article was well written but I have to agree about the MongoDB use case by Epic. Mongo has its place and it is mature enough that it can handle itself in a production setting.

That being said they had a massive outage due to a MongoDB issue.
I wrote a small python library to assist in querying the HN search API a little while back:

https://github.com/nicolashahn/py-search-hn

I also have an example of how to get all of a single user's comments:

https://github.com/nicolashahn/py-search-hn/blob/master/get_...

You could use a similar method for submissions. I'm not sure how getting all the stories or comments you've voted on would work, however.
Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.

Furthermore when the alternative is death or debilitation, the price a "consumer" is willing to pay is effectively everything they possess and can borrow. That is both a massive distortion and non-optimal for the economy as a whole.

There are certainly regulatory inefficiencies and other inefficiencies in healthcare markets, but a truly "free market" in healthcare not morally justifiable.
Force pushing code doesn’t make your old code private.
> GPL is also acceptable for stand-alone programs if you want to enforce openness, but never for libraries.

There's the option of using LGPL for libraries. That way, users of the library aren't required to be open source, but they are required to keep modifications of the library open source if distributed.
Although they're not easily repairable, they remain usable so much longer than competition. Not sure if this source is accurate, but I've heard the statistic that 63% of iPhones ever made are still being used [1], which I'm pretty sure you can't say about Android phones.

Also, my personal experience with Apple stuff is that it lasts quite long; for example, I used my last Macbook Pro for around 6 years, and even then it was still working just fine, I just wanted TouchID when I upgraded it. On the other hand, my dad, on Asus/Lenovo/Dell machines, has replaced his laptop 3 times in the same period.

Not to mention all the other people talking about just how small a slice of consumers actually do properly salvage and repair their stuff. I'd assume a tiny, tiny percent of sophisticated consumers actually do, while the vast majority don't go to much lengths to repair or properly dispose of their electronics.

I like repairability for myself because I am capable of DIY fixing things. But I don't assume that companies that do it do so because they're somehow more environmentally conscious, when probably plenty of other practices they do are extremely environmentally destructive.

[1] https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/63-percent-of-all-iphon...
Facebook users cannot avoid location-based ads, investigation finds
I don't find myself disagreeing with you that much here, but 13% is not quite enough to get me to push my team to make such a big change.

On the other hand, I've also had to push for getting any compression turned on at all. If all of my infrastructure already supported zstandard, getting a 3.5:1 compression ratio would be more compelling than 3.2:1, and I can imagine situations where it's easier to get buy-in.

But first every old cell phone and crappy web browser (read: 6 year old Microsoft browser) has to support it. Which is why you have people creating backward-compatible compressors that spit out files that zlib can decompress. Because otherwise you have to support and test 3 transport formats instead of 2.
I was talking to a friend the other day who told me about multiple recent grads from their PhD program joining tech companies that were willing to pay for a shared work space office for remote employees. One said it was significantly cheaper to expand their team with remote employees and offer to pay for WeWork spaces than to expand the physical office space they already had (new hires got to choose what they wanted to do).
Postgres is faster at json than mongo. Also the pipeline query strategy of mongo is terrible to deal with. A schema should not be flexible. Now I have to write a bunch of code to handle things that should have been enforced by the database. Postgres is incredibly easy to manage with actual default security. I know the mongo tutorial says to not run the default configuration, then why is it the default configuration. It's so easy to manage anyone can take it over for ransom.

Mongo literally has no upside vs postgres.
if you're taking advice on blogging, it's to have a successful blog. Otherwise why would you be taking advice? Just write whenever you want and whatever you want.
I've seen that compensation in Seattle, Denver/Boulder, Portland, Chicago (quant trading + Google n co), Boston, Austin, LA, Houston (two sigma). Some cities that had salaries that almost got there (100k+): Pittsburgh, Dallas, San Diego, Cincinnati (saw a 110k job ad, didn't interview, that would be a great comp to cost of living ratio), Madison WI, Atlanta (really close to 150k+)...

To check, usually you can find examples on h1bdata.info
I didn't see the words "Endowment Effect" in the abstract or in these HN comments, so here's a Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect

Just a little something to keep in mind, relevant to the discussion.
> Seems like a poorly designed incentive on Amazon's part is enough to establish reasonable doubt.

Yes, but a mere claim by the accused that the policy exists with no supporting evidence of the policy is not the same thing as “a poorly designed incentive on Amazon's part”.
And thus, nothing new was ever developed again.
This is the first thing I noticed too. This was an excellent read.
I've wondered myself, and from reading the commentary on Ars (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...) and elsewhere, the answer seems to be something like: in 1998 they could do so easily, and why take the risk of letting Steamboat Willie slip? They could, so they did. In ~2015-2018, it wasn't looking nearly so easy (and there was now Big Tech opposition to reckon with), so the calculus changed.
That could be the case! But was it clear in the article? I just reread it and the author doesn't indicate where he works at all. He does, however, quote himself saying: "[...] I’m pretty sure I’ve written that exact code?"

Not 'related' or 'similar' code, mind you. Maybe that's where I assumed he was part of the team.

If you're right and he doesn't work for the company the piece becomes pure speculation.
That's not true at all. He writes several posts a day.

https://daringfireball.net/
How much of the costs are from the bloat of things like custom web apps and custom reporting? Are newer online-only banks saving substantial amounts of overhead by getting by with the basics and doing their own API integrations?
> phone signals have been designated as possibly a cause of cancer by the WHO

No, it has not. "To date, research does not suggest any consistent evidence of adverse health effects from exposure to radiofrequency fields at levels below those that cause tissue heating" [1].

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagn...
SourcetrailDB – open-source library to write custom indexers
US Military budget comes from federal taxes which mostly comes from federal income taxes AFAIK and thus the top 1% contribute more than the bottom 90%:

"In 2014, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGIs below $38,173) earned 11.27 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid approximately $38 billion in taxes, or 2.75 percent of all income taxes in 2014.

In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGIs of $465,626 and above) earned 20.58 percent of all AGI in 2014, but paid 39.48 percent of all federal income taxes.

In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $543 billion, or 39.48 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid $400 billion, or 29.12 percent of all income taxes." [0]

[0]: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
I for one am still waiting for Service as a Service
I agree, but it looked them a year if I am reading the article right.

In most early stage startups, that would be an unacceptable loss of time.

So I don't judge them for doing a one-shot migration even if it causes an hour of downtime.

It all depends on the business.
I believe you're thinking of Uber: https://www.percona.com/live/plam16/sessions/relational-data...
First they came for the Common Region for Access Protection, and I did not speak out -- because I was not full of Common Regions for Access Protection.

Then they came for the f-bombs, and I did not Bitch Bend sensitively -- because I didn't care an f'ing BitArray.

Then they came for smarks, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a fan of olwm.

Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to curse for me!
I didn't know my LinkedIn profile lists where I've interviewed.
wow... I... I've been in IT for 25 years, a computer geek for 35, and... never even questioned it :O
Yeah, that was more of a "how to get popular" or "what to write on". If you're already in a good niche, write about your niche. If you're already popular, write about whatever you want.
How much money would it take to make volcanoes stop existing?
> At midnight on New Year's Eve

Don't count your mouse ears before they hatch, there's still time for Disney to step in and demand we support the poor artists by extending copyright terms.
There are things they consider difficult. The building is responsible for all tenants in the building. Things like key card access to the building after hours, key card access to the parking structure, etc are all handled by the building. If the shared office space tenant is constantly asking management to revoke keys, issue new keys, etc, that becomes a pain point for them. In my experience, it was the key card access that was a huge problem. Also, each new tenant usually is expected to fill out some sort of credit/background check, and those cost money. Shared office space companies can have very high turn over, so each new sub-tenant would have to go through that process as well. The building management is going to want their company they trust to do it rather than having the shared space company handle it on their end. Sure, they can request the fees be re-reimbursed, but they still have to spend time/effort on it.

So imagine all of the things you have to do for a new lease. Multiply that by the numbers in a shared office space. People like doing the least amount possible. CBRE managed buildings prefer to have long term leases, so they only have to do this at the beginning of a lease, not constantly.
Hi! I'm one of the authors. Good point, we should add something on that. Briefly our mongo db setup was running on 3 r4.xlarge instances which comes to around $5000/year with storage, plus the cost of opsmanager, which I think was around £40,000 including the support contract.

In Amazon it's harder to compare directly as the support contract is paid across all of our accounts, but we're spending around $13,000 for a highly available db.r4.xlarge postgres instance.

Performance wise, querying without an index is SLOW, basically not worth it - as we end up doing a scan of the entire database. Fortunately we don't need to do this as we can usually rely on the guardian content API for proper searching stuff. The average API (a Scalatra app) response time reaches 150ms at 'peak time'. This isn't a high-performance use case - around 1000 requests/minute at 'peak' time.
> Price discovery requires pricing some people out of the market. Period. There is no "free market" healthcare system that can or ever will deliver required health services to everyone.

There is no economic system that can deliver all of the health care to everyone who wants it.

Fundamentally, health care resources are limited: doctors, beds, MRI machines, etc.

Desire for health care is much less limited.

The question is not whether to give everyone what they want, but instead how to imperfectly ration what we have.
We should just make walking automated only, never have to bump into somebody or be stuck walking behind them ever again.
How I met my wife and why I built yet another flight price tracker
Hello world,

I am working on putting together the beta for http://TripFate.com and thought it might be a good idea to share the story and motivation behind it.

I met my wife exactly 4 years ago - all thanks to being on the right flight at the right time. Funny thing is, I wasn't really supposed to be on that flight to Rome. As much as I loved traveling, I was a poor college student and I couldn't really afford the expensive flights.

And then it happened. I was looking for flights to random destinations after wrapping up my project report at 4 AM, and I found a round-trip ticket to Rome (from NYC) for ~$110! It was crazy because the usual prices are at least in the $350-400 range.

I got super hooked! After I returned from my trip, I registered on a bunch of websites to get alerts if there was a price drop. I did get some good deals, but nothing was as crazy cheap as the one I had found for my trip to Rome.

Long story short, I created a service for myself over the years that'd look for flights from across the internet that really were 'great' for their price. In the beginning, it simply sent API requests and had a bunch of if-else statements. However, over the years, I've added a bunch of Machine Learning and Deep Learning tricks to the algorithm.

Moreover, I have instances of my 'smart travel finder' running on around 14 different servers around the world (who knew looking for a flight from India is cheaper sometimes!).

I started getting lots of really interesting flights: ~$170 round-trip to Cancun, ~$230 to Paris, ~$340 to India... and so I decided to share it with family and friends and friends of friends. Once the list grew to over 200, I thought maybe people would be interested in paying for the service, and that's how http://TripFate.com was born.
Yes but that is an issue with your choices, which makes sense we all want convenience, but you could make those choices from a bicycle perspective. I did, atm I get about 10 minutes extra every day because actualy do something with my commute. This is true for every place I've lived in (Europe, NA/SA and Asia), you just have to make the choice.
> , sorry

I forgive you.
My NeXT Cube was my introduction to TeX, and one for which I will be forever grateful.

I just wish that there was a machine running OPENSTEP 5.0 (as I think of Mac OS X) which I wanted to buy --- I prefer pen computers (the highwater mark of my computing experience was an NCR-3125 running PenPoint paired w/ a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet).
Yes, lots of differences:
- you can invest $10 for a month, get small profit and than start listening music
- you can sign-up for Spotify for $7 a month and get $3 back.
I'm curious, what kept you motivated to learn German? I've tried learning languages multiple times in the past, but keeping up with it has proved difficult because I have no use case.
Plans for world’s next major particle collider (ILC) dealt big blow
I sent them a message via their Contact page form.
> US Military budget comes from federal taxes

If the federal budget came from federal taxes, it would be necessarily constrained to them and deficits would be impossible.
In a nutshell, a Hamiltonian matrix (ie, the energy “Operator” matrix) must be Hermitian to have real eigenvalues. A Hermetian matrix means it’s equal to the complex conjugate of its transpose.

Scott mentions in this article that his work on Quantum Computing and Quantum Information deals mostly with real quantum states, not so much complex.

However these are primarily discrete states. Ie, matrix operators and vector wavestates.

When working with position and momentum spaces, you need to deal with continuous wavefunctions, and the presence of complex numbers becomes more immediate. Eg, the momentum operator, as written in position space, has a factor of i, when showing that momentum is the generator of positional translations (p = -i hbar d/dx). This is also why the gradient term of Schrodinger’s equation is negative (kinetic energy is proportional to momentum squared, so the i^2 makes it negative).

Similarly complex numbers appear with the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator when rearranging the Hamiltonian suit the ladder operators (or creation/annihilation operators).
even if it does get worse, a lot of people will simply leave it alone and forget that they're paying 10$ per month, simply yet another monthly expense. Amazon prime knows this.

Once, you've got the muscle memory of typing in "amazon.com" in the URL bar, it's really hard to let go of it, for most people. Amazon prime knows this.
You are not going to get popular overnight.
Interesting article, with the concepts explained in an easy way before jumping into tests.

I was impressed by the numbers on Firefox where Wasm was much faster than JS. It seems to be an indication of how inferior Firefox's JS engine is when compared to Chrome's. Good thing it improves quite a lot with Wasm.
The point is not to focus on a theme. Just get a wordpress and focus on the content. Then write.

The point is to write.
Seems like you're splitting semantic hairs.

The language maintainers regularly and consistently use "golang" as a disambiguation:

* golang.org

* github.com/golang

* Twitter @golang and #golang

* golang-nuts

In this context, it seems pretty "official" and the rebuke "factually incorrect" or at least the rebuke applies equally to the maintainers.

That said, it was a single wayward comment and it is (in my experience) out of character. I want to acknowledge that it was rude and validate the person who was wrongly rebuked; I explicitly don't want to pick on anyone nor tempt the Internet to pile on.
I have no idea why he did it instead of forking SBCL, but I thank him for it dearly. Lisp on LLVM is one of the things that will save it from dying. LLVM comes with extreme portability (future proofing to future platforms) and lots of industrial strength tooling. SBCL is very good, but it’s hard to say how long it will keep being developed.
How on earth can can i get downvoted for saying what is true?
I imagine a lot of people are going to be checking the comments here to find out what the answer to the question in the title is.

I believe this part is what the answer is supposed to be:

> “local tomography”: i.e., the “principle” that composite systems must be uniquely determined by the statistics of local measurements. And while this principle might sound vague and unobjectionable, to those in the business, it’s obvious what it’s going to be used for the second it’s introduced. Namely, it’s going to be used to rule out quantum mechanics over the real numbers, which would otherwise be a model for the axioms, and thus to “explain” why amplitudes have to be complex

I will leave it to other to explain what this means in comments. For the record I don't think this explanation is correct, and strongly object. I don't think amplitudes "have" to be complex, it's just a mathematical convenience. If anything, the actual question we should be asking is: why are complex numbers so convenient.